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Ramin Mazaheri

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Sergey Glaziev

A socialist spin to the ‘multipolarity’ thesis of a possible Putin successor

World War I, World War II, the Cold War, the fall of the USSR, the rise (and failure) of the European Union - all are conflicts in which Europe was central or primary, and all involved a battle of ideologies. The undeniable but totally unreported failure of the European Union combined with the staying power of China means the verdict is in: the ideology of liberalism has lost.

Is this the new “end of history”?

The nationalist view of modern history obscures the fact that it is ideologies which matter, not borders. Ideologies are what produce and define management systems - i.e. governments - and it’s crystal clear that the last 15 years have seen the socialist-inspired management system (China, Iran, North Korea and to a lesser extent Russia) defeat the liberalism-inspired management system economically, militarily and politically. Liberalism is at a Great Depression-level nadir in terms of global admiration.

The French Revolution was not French imperialism whatsoever but an idea: that feudalism must end. World War I was an idea: that liberalism - with its components of imperialism and high finance domination - was at least better than absolute monarchism. World War II was an idea: that both liberalism and socialism must be toppled by nationalist-corporatist fascism, but fascism lost and was absorbed by the liberalist camp. The Cold War was an idea: that liberalism and socialism cannot coexist, and - in the battlefield of Europe only - socialism lost. The “unipolar world” was an idea: that liberalism will usher in the “end of history” after (allegedly) defeating socialism and absorbing monarchism and fascism.

The ideology of liberalism viewed Europe in the 1990s as a rabid imperialist would view the moon if it had oxygen and water: virgin space to create a new world. The pan-European project was indeed this new world, as it is more liberalist in conception than even the United States. The EU/Eurozone was supposed to be liberalism’s highest, most shining city on a hill.

I was re-reading Sergey Glazyev’s influential article Patterns Of Formation And Disappearance Of Global Economic Poles from Spring 2023. Glazyev is a longtime post-communist Russian politician, economist and the current Commissioner for Integration and Macroeconomics within the Eurasian Economic Commission. He is often called among the top few potential successors to Putin, and his article is outstanding - something Xi and Khamenei could come up with but never Trump or Biden. It provides a major distillation of the new multipolar view of the world, and via some excellent and unique historical perspectives which are simply beyond the ken of most Western analysts.

In it he describes - but only if you really read it closely, as he only mentions this at the very end - what I’ll call a “Imperial vs. Integral thesis”. The latter worldview is being implemented by a diversity- and sovereignty-accepting China - this is exemplified by its multinational and multicultural Belt and Road project - to replace the Imperial worldview of the diminishing West. It is the rejecting of international cooperation which is the very essence of competitive liberalism and imperialism, after all - they don’t even work together among their own bloc, as evidenced by the plundering/self-immolation of the EU.

He quotes late-20th century Italian economist Giovanni Arrighi’s use of a “World Economic Order” concept and relays his summation of the succession of the most dominant poles of the global economy since the discovery of the Western Hemisphere: “Spanish-Genovese (Genoa financed the Spanish expeditions), Dutch, English and American ruling elites, now superseded by the Chinese communists.” In short, the management efficiency of the systems (not just their elites, as Glazyev repeatedly says) of these poles became dominant, propelled global economic development and -crucially - served as a model for other countries.

“They (the dominant pole) also serve as a model for periphery countries, which try to catch up with the leader by importing the institutions imposed by it. Therefore, the institutional system of the world economy permeates the reproduction of the entire world economy in the unity of its national, regional and international components.”

The pan-European project is precisely explained here: Europe took American liberalism as their model as a way “to catch up” with the US, but it has been nothing but catastrophe and open failure.

“The institutions of the leading country, which have a dominant influence on the international institutions that regulate the world market and international trade, economic and financial relations, are of primary importance.”

But what do you do when the institutions of the leading country no longer provide a workable model? Then you have the Western world in 2024, and this is why the failure of the EU/Eurozone is the biggest story of our century thus far: Liberalism’s efficiency has declined, and to the point where different models which were once on the periphery have proven to have qualitatively more efficient modes and institutions - socialist democracy - and they are now acquiring global dominance.

Glazyev writes that these management systems are so different that they have only transitioned from one to the other via a major war and social revolution, in order to crush the obsolete management system. This is what happened to - if I can give some examples - the feudal system in 1789, the slave/colony based economy in 1865 and the system of absolute monarchy in 1918. It is their refusal to adopt the more efficient, and always more moral and democratic (Glazyev stresses neither of these latter two critical components), system of governance that leads to the stagnation and decline of the once-dominant “World Economic Models” (WEM): “…the core countries of the old WEM are plunging into a structural crisis and depression caused by excessive concentration of capital in the obsolete productions of the former technological mode.”

This particular version the pan-European project is precisely this over-investment in an obsolete mode, and that mode is liberalism.

Lastly, in an interesting section Glazyev astutely notes that outside of Arrighi’s analysis of World Economic Model dominance does indeed stand Russia.

“As a result of this competition, a global leader emerges and steadily increases its dominance. Besides them, there is also Russia, which maintains its global influence in various political forms throughout the period under consideration, whose historical role Arrighi has completely ignored.”

This is what I mean by analyses which are simply beyond the ken of most Western analysts: huge chunks of the world are often simply omitted by them in their “global” analyses.

Glazyev is entirely right: he notes that from 1492 on the people of Rus held an empire that was really not much inferior to any other of the pole leaders - Imperial Spain, the seafaring Dutch, the English, the Americans and now the Chinese are not so very much more advanced than mighty Russia, no? Western-centric historians, politicians and analysts have ignored this fact of history, and many even blithely accepted the stupidities of John McCain’s gallingly ignorant description of Russia as a “a giant gas station pretending to be a real country”.

Even Arrighi never considered: What about Russia? Indeed, but to Glazyev I could say: what about Persia/Iran, which he barely mentions?

Glazyev’s key mistakes, probably caused by adherence to liberalism

We must correct Glazyev’s over-excited relegating of the US into a complete non-pole of global power. Centuries of stolen wages and plunder simply don’t evaporate, and no nation is going to violently repossess much of America’s property. So let’s say that Glazyev is really talking about a tripolar system here in his vision of the future, and he basically admits as much later:

“…The bipolar core of the new (integral) IEU (note: IEU is used the same as World Economic Model), with communist (China) and democratic (India) poles, whose competition will produce half of the GDP growth. […] Finally, the third variety of the new world economic order is determined by the interests of a financial oligarchy that aspires to world domination. It is accomplished through liberal globalization, which consists of the obfuscation of national institutions of economic regulation and the subordination of its reproduction to the interests of international capital. The dominant position in the structure of the latter is occupied by a few dozen intertwined American-European family clans that control the major financial holdings, power structures, intelligence services, media, political parties and the apparatus of executive power.”

India, China and the West - choose your “World Economic Model” to follow.

A couple problems, however,

Firstly Glazyev both correctly and incorrectly estimates India. However, his analysis is mostly praiseworthy in perceiving that India is a huge part of the global future, which most Westerners simply cannot admit.

He notes that India’s constitution openly declares it to be a socialist republic (Indian Constitution: India is a “sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic”), and he notes that in 1969 India nationalised their banks. Where Glazyev errs is by believing that India is still “democratic” - and Glazyev clearly implies that he means “liberal democratic”, as he holds Switzerland up as a sort of equal to Indian “democracy” because of their use of referendums. The two are not the same whatsoever, and this is a false grouping by Glazyev - should Switzerland ever nationalise their private banks the rest of the liberal West would immediately invade and retake their ill-gotten gains.

He also errs by believing that by being “communist” China is NOT democratic - this is completely false, as China simply follows the model, rules, mores and structures of socialist democracy and not liberal democracy. Glazyev, being a very successful post-communist Russian liberal democratic politician, apparently does not believe that China can be both socialist and democratic, and he also believes that India is “democratic” even though nationalising their banks is not just anathema but even war-provoking for any liberal “democratic” country.

Glazyev also persists in the maddening, widespread refusal to call “liberalism” simply “liberalism”. There is NO difference between “globalism” and “liberalism” in the sense that - as Marx essentially noted in 1848 France - both are run by and for the 1%. A “financial oligarchy that aspires to world domination… which consists of the obfuscation of national institutions of economic regulation and the subordination of its reproduction to the interests of international capital” - this is what liberalism has been for over 175 years! So we must realise that Glazyev fails to make the correct distinctions between “liberalism” and “socialism”, but getting this wrong is what non-socialists do all the time, in their effort obfuscate the awful failed project which is 175+ years of liberalism.

Important points indeed, but the larger point to make here is that Glazyev is correct in seeing the future as a three-way fight between the models of left-wing socialism (China), right-wing socialism (India) and liberalism.

And, as he notes, much like the earlier fight between socialism (USSR), liberalism (USA) and fascism (Germany) this is another battle of three where only two poles can prevail.

Similarly, in 1914 there were also three poles - socialism, liberalism and monarchism - and monarchism would be absorbed by liberalism. To socialists monarchism is, of course, anathema. The same goes for fascism - absorbed by liberalism, anathema to socialism.

But it’s this exposure of liberalism as the now-clearly inefficient governmental mode which is so historically vital for us to understand and proclaim today. Liberalism is the now-discredited, obviously inefficient WEM which is on its way out historically.

The defeat of Ukraine on the battlefield has shown that liberalism - with all its imperialist menace and all its tax revenue fascistically devoted their military - cannot fight against the more efficient socialist-inspired (on the military-economic planning level) Russia. The victory of China on the economic field since 2008 has shown that liberalism cannot fight against the more efficient socialist-inspired model there either. As Glazyev writes:

“The reasons for the PRC’s superior performance lie in the institutional structure of the new WEM (World Economic Model/management system), which ensures qualitatively more efficient management of economic development. By combining the institutions of central planning and market competition, the new world economic order demonstrates a quantum leap in the efficiency of socio-economic development management compared to the world order systems that preceded it: the Soviet one, with directive planning and total statism, and the American one, dominated by the financial oligarchy and transnational corporations.”

Even National Geographic, a mouthpiece for US imperial policies and propaganda, ran a glowing article about the Trans-Iranian railway in March, 2022.

Iran's comfortable and ultrafast train travel. People can sit back, watch movies or sleep. Nothing like this in America.

This is all clear and undeniable, as is the victory of Russia over the combined efforts of the liberal West in Ukraine.

Glazyev, perhaps as a liberal politician, almost totally does not discuss either imperialism or morality - the former because that would expose the true hidden basis of liberalism’s alleged “efficiency”: “S. Huntington admitted, ‘not because of the superiority of their ideas, moral values or religion (to which few other civilizations have been converted), but rather because of superiority in the use of organized violence.’” The latter is not discussed because morality is excised from liberalism, which claims to be the most “moral” economic mode mainly via constant false demonisation other modes. For liberalism (think of “Fordism” in the book Brave New World) efficiency is the highest morality - so we an say that even on liberalism’s own terms it is now clearly “immoral” to be a liberalist.

Glazyev gets a lot right - it’s a superb article - but one of the things he fails at is pointing out the absolute failure of liberalism as evidenced by the perpetually stagnant Europe. Does this omission mean Russia is going to make the same mistake as Iran did?

Significantly, Glazyev has failed to learn from Iran and their failed JCPOA thesis that Europe would break away from Washington on issues of primary foreign policy importance if Europe’s interests were greatly threatened. Europe did not break away even though Iran offered it excellent, mutually-beneficial terms, and we see how Europe did not break away even as Washington demands Europe impoverish itself - via inflation, via gutting their reserves of arms, via destroying their reputation in the Global South - with its incredibly self-harming policy towards the war in Ukraine.

Glazyev makes a major error in his conclusion by classifying Europe thusly in his final, prognosticating section, titled “Pole configuration of the new economic order”:

“The wandering between the cores of the old and new (World Economic Models), the European Union, Turkey, and the Arab world, whose chances for world influence will depend on their ability to break free from U.S. dictates.”

The EU is no “wanderer” - they have proven themselves to be a 51st state over and over, and this is because the question is not nationalist but ideological: the advent of the European Union totally ended the communist eastern half and the social democratic western half - Europe is a liberal bloc through and through now. From structure to practice - from soup to nuts and all courses in between - the difference between what a pan-European project might be (1948-2008) and what the pan-European project definitely is (2009-today) is undeniable and clear.

The error in including Europe in this grouping is to make the same “mistake” that Iran made: the EU is no wanderer but is totally allied to Washington even if it costs them. It is a toxic marriage, but Iran proved that it is a marriage nonetheless.

This marriage would be impossible were Europe divided into over two dozen nations, but the European Union has been a working - if also inefficient - political reality since 2009.

Should Europe somehow abandon Washington and thus abandon the liberalism which guides its very governance and structures, this could only be done in a true revolution which ends this version of the pan-European project and sets the project a new, more progressive course. The ideology at fault here is not “pan-Europeanism” but the same old liberalism versus socialism.

Are we assuming that Europe will “realize” that socialism is the more efficient mode of governance before the US does? Why? The two are joined because they are liberal capitalist imperialists through and through.

Glazyev’s ultimate answer, essentially, is that new Global South organisations such as BRICS will practically supersede or simply ignore (as the West does) the United Nations.

“The association of countries in large international organizations such as the SCO and BRICS represents a qualitatively new model of cooperation that honors diversity in contrast to the universal forms of liberal globalization. Its core principle is firm support for universally recognized principles and norms of international law and rejection of policies of coercive pressure and infringement on the sovereignty of other states. The principles of the international order, shared by the countries of the emerging ‘core’ of the new world order, are fundamentally different from those characteristic of previous world orders shaped by Western European civilization….”

It’s good that the Commissioner for Integration and Macroeconomics within the Eurasian Economic Commission has such high hopes. We can simply look at the UN’s inability to merely rein in Israel’s latest invasion of Gaza as proof of the UN’s structural fecklessness.

There is no doubt that the liberal West, with its centuries of stolen wages, will retain major influence, but there is also no doubt that their “World Economic Model” is crumbling in comparison to socialist-inspired nations. It’s clearer every day that this is obvious, and that liberalism will not be emulated much longer by the periphery, only imposed, orchestrated and smuggled.

China proved this economically, Russia proved this militarily and Iran has proved this spiritually - liberalism is, to put kindly, no longer an “efficient model”.

It’s an amazing time to be alive - if you’re a socialist. The real and existential chaos of non-socialists is palpable, deserved and entirely avoidable.

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RAMIN MAZAHERI

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Why is the biggest political story of our era so underreported?

"For a Europe of peoples, not multinationals", proclaims this Yellow Vests sign. Dangerous fellas, hence ruthlessly repressed.

I have returned to Paris and can report that things are as politically bleak as ever, continuing a trend which began with the rubber bullet-smashing of the Yellow Vest movement in 2019. The European Union has become truly American (which was often alleged to be the ultimate goal): it’s politically apathetic.

There are no domestic political movements to report on - the French MSM just reports on Ukraine, Israel and (as usual) ecology.

This is not as it used to be.

Prior to the six months of bloody Saturdays over 2018-19 France had seen a full decade of incredible political activism. Leftist planning agendas were full of protests, gatherings and strikes concerning: Sarkozy’s bailouts in late 2008, Hollande’s hopeful Socialist Party election, his subsequent U-turn on austerity, the forceful imposition of austerity by Brussels, the fabrication of Macron, his immediate detestation, the spectacularly unprecedented support for - and then the spectacularly unprecedented repression of - les gilets jaunes - this was a 10-year period of intense, intense activism.

Were it not for Israel’s latest and most brutal invasion of Gaza, and combined with Macron’s incredible 7-years-running refusal to interact with the press (the exact opposite of Sarkozy), I’m not sure I’d have much work to do here?

There is a story to cover, and it’s the most important one, but it’s almost impossible to cover via PressTV news reports: the obvious failure of the pan-European project.

This is the biggest political story of the 21st century, and yet it’s going undiscussed year after year. Brexit put it on the front pages, and then so did the Yellow Vests, but Euroscepticism has been suppressed for four years now.

But what’s a bigger story in the 21st century than the economic, political and confidence collapse of the biggest economic bloc in the world?

The war on the Muslim world since 9/11? That’s something, indeed, but this is the re-sundering of a region which was already suppressed by two centuries of colonialism and then neo-colonialism.

The rise of China? That was something inevitable and unstoppable, due to the superior planning and cohesion of socialist-inspired governments. Of course, China’s sudden rise was aided by the Great Financial Crisis which devastated the West, who then exacerbated it with their predictably awful, inequality-generating policies of bailouts, austerity, QE and ZIRP.

Fifteen years ago who did not expect that a united Europe, and one working in what is now clearly lockstep with the United States, would become an unstoppable project?

The alleged solution of “social democracy” goes way back to the 1890s - what we have witnessed hasn’t been the “death of communism” but the “death of social democracy” instead.

That’s the big story: that Europe has not just stopped in its tracks but stagnated, regressed, devolved, disappointed, etc. and etc.

It’s truly historical. What the demise of the pan-European project means is the end of the “social democratic” model: if any region had implemented a “third way” between liberalism and socialism it was Europe. The alleged solution of “social democracy” goes way back to the 1890s - what we have witnessed hasn’t been the “death of communism” but the “death of social democracy” instead.

What a story, no? It was as the proponents of socialist democracy always predicted: social democracy inevitably reverts back to mere liberal democracy. (Or crumbles into fascism.) It’s truly historical.

Back in the US someone recently asked me why I kept referring to the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, saying it was old history, and it made me pause. They never talk about it in the US anymore, that’s true. However, as soon as I returned to France I was confronted with multiple references to it in journalism and art. But they only get the dates right - roughly.

Yes, Europe took a more far-right economic approach (austerity) than the US (Europe had more social democracy to roll back, of course), but the problem is not the 2007-8 Great Financial Crisis nor austerity - the problem is the pan-European project itself, and this is precisely what is suppressed.

It is easy to suppress, or just be confused, because the timelines are so similar: the pan-European project didn’t truly begin until the undemocratic passage of the Lisbon Treaty of 2009, which was forced through thanks to the chaos surrounding the Great Financial Crisis and subsequent European Debt Crisis (starting 2009).

Why has nobody kept referring to the Lisbon Treaty of 2009? I am definitely one of the very few journalists who do. Now that the UK is out the Anglophone world doesn’t care, I suppose.

Ukraine will make or break the pan-European project

The European Union succeeds at nothing and nor do they stand for anything, so they’re desperate for any rallying cry for “Europe!”, and they’ve found one in Ukraine.

Of course, Europe has already failed Ukraine: their weaponry is being defeated, their production capabilities aren’t up to the job, everybody knows they’re just setting Ukraine up for the same debt traps they laid for a country like Greece, and they have failed (purposely) to find a diplomatic solution. Their only success is in their spectacularly prejudiced prioritising of Ukrainian refugees: this was, of course, to keep flooding the labor market with desperate, low-wage accepting workers amid record-high inflation - anything to keep wage demands down.

The reality is that Ukraine is going to either be the EU’s final undoing, or it will somehow lead to the “more Europe” that is the only way this misguided economic-but-not-political federalist project could ever possibly succeed.

Europe’s leaders know Ukraine is their best - given the far-right victories looming in European Parliament elections this spring - chances, which are diminishing, to rally Europe behind the pan-European project and away from Euroscepticism.

Remember that in two years Macron has gone from “we must not embarrass Russia” to calling other European countries “cowardly” for not buying Ukraine even more weapons, and even threatening to land NATO troops. Why the huge shift?

Of course war is good for business - France has soared to become the #2 arms merchant in the world. But in a bloc which has a pre-Covid history which no one in the 1% wants anyone to remember, it’s only via war with Russia that European public opinion could possibly be united in favor of “Europe!”.

European imperialists have run out of racism and now can only rely on nationalist prejudice - this is what the EU has revealed itself to be. Furthermore, during the 2010s we were constantly told in France that the pan-European project was the only reason war didn’t break out in Europe - recall how the EU won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, amid mass anti-austerity repression? This justification is now out the window.

No peace, no public opinion in public policy, no prosperity - no success for the EU, and when will success ever arrive?

Now isn’t the time, Europeans are being told, to argue about the lack of results in the pan-European project - Putin is at the doorstep. Marine Le Pen fairly accused Macron of creating a situation - surrounding this week’s French Parliamentary approval of a 10-year military pact with Ukraine - where, “You’re either with Macron or you’re with Putin”. That’s not just Russophobia or scapegoating - that is the summation of Macron’s whole political policy now.

Nobody - no popular democratic majority - has ever been or will ever be with Macron, but the fabrication of false unity is what Ukraine is being manipulated for here in Europe.

But it’s going to be even bigger than that in the coming months and maybe even years, namely: “Either you’re with the pan-European project or you’re with Putin”.

After all, how else can support for the pan-European project possibly be created in 2024? They cannot stand on their results, and they cannot stand on hopes that the project will suddenly become workable, profitable, democratic, morally responsible, inspire confidence, etc.

The failure of Europe - that’s the biggest story of the 21st century.

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Ramin Mazaheri

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A happy Maomas to all! He would have turned 130 last week, on December 26.

In memoriam I am republishing a chapter from my book on China. This chapter was the only chapter republished by the longest continuously published socialist magazine in the United States, the Monthly Review.

In 1966 Mao swam across the Yangzi (Yangtze) River, producing vast Western consternation and even ridicule, yet inspiring the Cultural Revolution in China.

So far as I know, this article is the only place you can find a plausible explanation for Mao’s swim.

That’s an extremely bold statement, but I contend that Mao’s intellectual peers grasped his symbolism. Read on, but the answer is rooted in the reality that Confucianism hasn’t just made a comeback under Xi - it was already latent under Mao and is probably a permanent feature of Chinese culture.

Feel free to comment if you agree or disagree, and - to make clear - the free republishing of any of my writing is always approved.

Chapter 4: Mao’s legacy defended, and famous swim decoded, for clueless academics

There is a great and hilarious story about Mao during the Cultural Revolution, which is relayed in the Western university-standard textbook, China: A New History by “the West’s doyen on China,” John King Fairbank of Harvard University, who “is credited with building the field of China studies in the United States”.

In late 1965 the rumblings of the Cultural Revolution had begun, due to grumblings over corruption, revisionism (“taking the capitalist road,” the selling out of socialism, etc.), and the snooty technocratism of urbanites. The party, led by Mao, saw these trends as threats to the common good, the revolution, and the Party’s “Heavenly Mandate” — the millennia-old concept that China’s rulers are chosen by Heaven to rule, and that they must actually display this divinity via perfectly moral conduct and leadership — or else revolt is justified.

Mao, being the great progressive leader he was, was against these anti-socialist trends. But there was only so much he could do about it on his own. Mao had launched no less than seven anti-corruption campaigns since 1949, but to no avail: the problem was deeply embedded, and beyond the reach of one man – even if one assumes Mao to be the totalitarian “Mao the Terrible” the West portrays him as.

With decades of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist fighting clearly under threat from domestic reactionaries, in 1966 Mao supervised the Party’s May 16 Directive to state the threat clearly: “…they will seize political power and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.” Decoded: the corrupt pro-capitalists will turn China into a West European (bourgeois) democracy.

And from a foreign policy perspective in 1966, a crisis was undoubtedly at China’s doorstep: the U.S. was massively invading Vietnam, and the largest communist party in the world not in power was being the victim of a literal genocide in Indonesia, with U.S. support.

Other than making political statements to a Party which contained many cadres who were only concerned about increasing their profits, he had only one other recourse–popular opinion.

That was all preamble. This brings me to that great and hilarious story.

‘Crossing the great river’: to seize the moment you have to first understand the meaning

The retelling of Fairbanks:

“In the second phase of the Cultural Revolution from August 1966 to January 1967 Chairman Mao was a great showman. The dutiful Liu Shaoqi, already doomed for destruction, was orchestrating the anti-revisionist movement among the party faithful. In July 1966 the Chinese public was electrified to learn that Mao had come north, pausing on the way to swim across the Yangzi. Since rural Chinese generally could not swim and few adventurers had ever tried the Yangzi this was like the news that Queen Elizabeth II had swum the Channel. He was obviously a paragon of athleticism capable of superhuman feats. (Photos showing his head on top of the water suggest Mao did not use a crawl, side stroke, backstroke, or breaststroke but swam in his own fashion standing upright in–not on–the water. He was clocked at an unusually fast speed.)”

Hilarious! And written with maximum effort for humour, too! What the heck was Mao doing?! Those inscrutable Chinese – we’ll never figure them out! Mao was just being Mao – a capricious tyrant – but that one takes the cake! Elizabeth II swimming the Channel, LOL – good show!

It’s too bad that Fairbanks – one of the key American shapers of thought on China for decades – had no idea why such a move “electrified” China. Fairbanks implies that Mao’s demonstration was pure self-aggrandisement in the most Western-individualist, election-campaigning of fashions: “I am so superhuman that I can crush all dissent – just watch me doggy-paddle over the Yangzi.

Too bad that makes no sense at all.

Time and again Mao’s swim is reported by Westerners as being “loaded with symbolism for the Chinese people,” but I have never seen the symbolism actually explained.

This was the meaning Fairbanks missed and which many of the People of China did not:

The ethical book of the Chinese is the I Ching, the “Book of Change”, which is the world’s oldest book in the world for a reason: it can be foolishly used as a divination tool – just as opening the Koran to a random page is used to “give advice” to some Muslims – but the I Ching is truly a master guidebook of human- and Heaven-based morality.

Briefly, the I Ching examines 64 ethical, personal and social concepts, conditions and states. One meditates at length on a range of concepts – “Mutual Influence”, “Bringing Together”, “Darkness”, “Proceeding Humbly”, “Not Yet Fulfilled”, etc. – and the book discusses their true meaning, how they progress in stages and how they interrelate with other concepts.

In this book is occasionally a phrase: “Favorable to cross great rivers.”

When the I Ching reads that it is “Favorable to cross great rivers” that means it is the right time to dare the greatest of undertakings. Indeed, this sentence reflects the maximum amount of good and luck possible — it’s the best possible news, and means Heaven above could not look upon you or your plans more favourably.

I Ching judgments can be negative, neutral, slightly favourable, etc. If it reads “Not favourable to cross great rivers”, it means:stop what you are doing and don’t try it.

But nothing is better than “Favorable to cross great rivers.” It means: “take courage, Heaven smiles upon you, you are just, you are in tune with ethics, in tune with the Tao (a Chinese concept very similar to the Holy Spirit), humanity and nature,” etc.

So for Mao to literally cross the great river in July 1966 was to emphatically, physically and religiously tell all the Chinese People: “Join me in daring this great undertaking of the Cultural Revolution. Cross the great river now – in real life.”

When one is thus able to look at Mao’s swim through the eyes of a Chinese person and can fully understand the cultural context, as well as the historical/political context, then we finally see how it could have “electrified” China: For the Chinese, it is truly as if he had re-enacted a scene from the Bible.

The only way I could compare it for Iranians is thusly: In order to defend Iran’s sovereign right to a nuclear energy program Supreme Leader Khamenei travels to Karbala, Iraq, and has a boxing match with Mike Tyson. (If you don’t understand this please don’t pretend to tell me that you know Iran, our religion, and our culture.) I’m sure Iranians are smirking, not because of Khamenei’s advanced age and the absurdity of such a fight, but because they know exactly what I mean: This would be a reenactment of the glorious and assured annihilation – thus the willing martyrdom – of Imam Hossein, which inspires all Shia as much as the suffering of Jesus does for Christians (even more in 2018, I would say, as the annual multi-million pilgrimages to Karbala show and which Western media certainly does NOT want to show).

To explain it to the French: In order to demand the reversal of Brexit, neoliberal Macron goes to Rouen and fields media questions as he’s tied to a stake.

For the Americans: acquiescing to Russophobia, Trump invites Putin over for diplomatic talks, but then personally captains a ship across the Potomac to surprisingly capture the Russian leader, like George Washington.

Did Mao know what he was doing? As the son of a rich farmer he went to school, where he was undoubtedly instructed in the Chinese classics, as education centered around them. Mao also knew that other educated people were similarly instructed in the I Ching. The only question which I cannot definitely answer, as I have never been embedded in Chinese popular culture, is: how likely is it that the average person have been familiar with the sayings of the Chinese classics and the I Ching?

I think we can say with confidence: “At least somewhat familiar,” no? Grow up in the West and you will be familiar with Biblical sayings even if you aren’t Christian. It is universally reported that the swim somehow galvanised the nation, and I doubt it was the view of an old man doing the doggy-paddle. In a perpetual question in semiotics: why this, and not that? I.e., why not climb a mountain to “electrify” the people, or chop down a cherry tree, or save a lamb? You certainly can’t argue with the results – we can only try to explain them.

And yet Fairbank – the China scholar best-known to the U.S. public and academia alike – clearly had no idea of what Mao was doing, what it represented, and why it was inspirational. Fairbank clearly had not even read the I Ching, perhaps the single most important foundation of Chinese culture, despite being Harvard University’s first-ever China “scholar.” That is a recipe for terrible scholarship, terrible teaching and ignorant-but-arrogant students.

It is a scholarship which is typical of the West, and which was debunked so superbly by Edward Said’s Orientalism. It is scholars who don’t go to foreign lands to learn and respect the local culture – they go there to proselytise their own ideas and to return with stories which confirm the standard stereotypes, almost as if they had never been there at all. Just as those who used to be called “Oriental scholars” never read the Koran, I highly doubt that Fairbank’s knowledge of China extended beyond the superficial and beyond what was useful for him as an American.

So there is little wonder, to one who understands the cultural significance, how China did not erupt in delirious, sweet, modern and violent revolution against reactionary forces shortly after the swim. The swim was Mao’s obviously successful attempt to get the People inspired, and to reassure the People that (some of) their leadership was on their side, and on the side of preserving the popular revolution the nation worked so hard to install.

There are other facts and anecdotes of history to relate to defend Mao, but I chose this one because it illustrates how Fairbank and the Westerners who have studied for China, and have given us our “wisdom” of Mao’s alleged tyranny, actually have very little comprehension of the Chinese soul. Their scholarship exists to defend their own ideas, not to understand the amazing qualities of other cultures, and are genuine only in their reactionary anti-socialism, And yet these are the people who inform today’s students, journalists and citizenry in the West.

But new scholars, such as Jeff J. Brown and his superb, factual account of Chinese history since 1949, China is Communist, Dammit, wades unapologetically into the tidal wave of Western disapproval to deliver a history which is actually sympathetic to Chinese people.

I could have continued giving more and more facts and statistics to prove that Mao’s tenure greatly benefitted the average person – how long do you have? – because there are many. Thankfully, unlike when I was growing up, they are now actually available on the internet for all to find.

Instead of using statistics, I thought this anecdote showed just how pathetically lost, how uninterested, how much lack of soul the people informing the West on China really have had. Unlike Brown, establishment scholars on China are not trying at all to learn from, to understand, or to defend the Chinese people – they are trying to conquer it culturally. If that fails — then to conquer it militarily.

To prove my objectivity: A Chinese person is better qualified to verify the relationship between Mao’s swim and the I Ching. But what if they haven’t read the Chinese classics? I have talked to two handfuls of Chinese people I know and none have read them – all are under 40 years old – and therefore they are not qualified to make this verification. This hypothesis thus remains for the Chinese to verify but I say the circumstantial evidence is weighty: just because I have not seen this hypothesis elsewhere, that only confirms that very few people have read the Chinese classics, and analysed them in a political sense, and written about that analysis in a Western language.

Fairbank did not do this, even though it was his charge to do exactly that. Hopefully some Chinese political scholar can confirm my theory but how many of them read English? Such is the slow pace of cultural globalisation / awareness, but the internet is speeding these things up, as this article shows.

Rehabilitating Mao is unlikely—there is no will to change in the West

John Lennon had it right: “If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / you ain’t gonna make it with anyone, anyhow.”

Why, because few people in the 1960s in the West were truly political (excepting African-Americans). Obviously nearly none were dedicated revolutionaries because the West had zero revolutions. They looked to minstrels like the Beatles to lead a Revolution – yet their famous song “Revolution” is clearly designed to appropriate the word away from the political sphere: the lyrics are not just apolitical but 100% anti-politics.

Many in the 1960s sure postured like revolutionaries, though. My impression is that their main goal was to “make it” with the opposite sex, and that is really not something revolutionary in human history.

The irony is that if Lennon understood Mao – if Lennon had grasped the goal of the Cultural Revolution, which I related in the previous article of this series – he would have seen that Mao’s 1960s anti-establishment, anti-corrupt “middle aged / old people” view, his slogans like “It Is Right To Rebel”, was incredibly rock and roll!

In his song “God”, Lennon says he believes in nothing, including the I Ching, even listing it before the Bible. He also doesn’t believe in people, ideas or methods: he only believes in himself. “I believe in me/ Yoko and me/ and that’s reality”.

So Lennon believed in individualism and his romantic love — that’s nice, for him.

Lennon concludes by opining that “the dream is over” — and that he, “was the dream weaver”. The literal meaning for Lennon the ‘60s icon seems clear—or perhaps he was giving us a Hindu-inspired “life is a dream” idea. Lennon finishes by saying that, in 1970, “You just have to carry on / the dream is over”. This reminds us today of the slogan “Keep calm and carry on” which swept England doing the 2009 financial crisis, a paean to their wilfully-blind conservatism which will not countenance even the idea of discussing the idea of changing the status quo regardless of any crisis.

So when it comes to Lennon and Mao: whom is the man of the People, the social revolutionary and the ethicist, and whom is merely another self-centred ego-freak? Whom is the man of social change, and whom is the status quo man urging everyone not to even bother trying? The answer is clear, and it is certainly the opposite of the West’s mainstream belief.

Indeed, who would have thought that drug-using minstrels would ultimately get bored by worldly, wonkish, societal issues? Maybe the West can next turn to a heroin-using jazz drummer for advice on urban planning models, hmmm?

Should we defend Mao?

No, it will make us look uncool, and the John Lennons of the world will call us “squares”.

The bad news is: you are certainly a square if you have read this far!

Seriously: Yes, we should, mainly to humbly acknowledge the superior judgement of the Chinese people on their own history. The Chinese People defend Mao, and that should be enough for leftists worldwide.

Popular approval is a nearly infallible judge, no? Castro, Khomeini, Ho Chi Minh, Sankara, Mao – all are universally loved in their home countries. Pol Pot, for example, is a leftist leader who is not revered by Cambodians so it’s not as if all leftists are loved (Pol Pot was a rabid xenophobe, and thus not a true leftist). Libya is a bit split on the legacy of Khadaffi, but his virtues certainly appear clearly in retrospect.

I think that Fairbank, even if he actually did talk to average Chinese people about Mao, was never willing to honestly report their opinion.

Brown, however, has talked to “thousands” of Chinese people over his decades living there. He says that, while they criticise aspects of the Communist Party:

“But through it all, I can safely say that about 98% of the Chinese I’ve talked to like Mao and what he did for China. His image adorns taxi cabs, like an amulet of St. Christopher, to ward off accidents. He is on walls of privately owned offices, businesses, restaurants–these are private, not government. They are citizens who have decided to show their admiration for the man, on their own. He’s everywhere. How can this be in the face of relentless demonization by Western media, educators, historians and politicians?”

People will say: it’s because the Chinese government blocks the truth about Mao – oh, if only they could hear our pure Western voices!

Such a response, again, inaccurately and arrogantly implies that the West knows Chinese history and culture better than the Chinese themselves. The government has openly stated that Mao was “70% right and 30% wrong”, so it’s not as if there is an all-dominating, state-sponsored cult of personality.

Beyond respecting obviously better-informed local opinion–a point which most treat as secondary–I almost refuse to have the “Mao was evil” conversation for more than 15 seconds. I give 15 seconds because I was raised to be polite.

To equivocate Mao with Hitler is to equivocate two people who fought against each other — it’s inherently absurd.
To claim Mao was as bad as Japanese fascists or American capitalists is also to equivocate groups with sharply different belief systems and goals.
In 1978, two years after Mao’s died, China’s Gini coefficient (the most commonly used measurement of inequality) was a sparkling 0.16. The lowest score is currently 0.25 (Finland). It’s fair to say that Mao’s single most-important goal was to create an equal society: he succeeded better than almost anyone, ever.

So I’m done with that one, and quickly.

Mighty Mao was never the West’s to take away, and he’ll never leave

The West’s discussion of Mao – along with the Great Leap Forward’s famine and the Cultural Revolution – is based on ignorance, arrogance and the political nihilism of failed “revolutionaries” and hardened reactionaries.

To repeat, for hard statistics about the socio-economic improvement for the average Chinese person during Mao’s stewardship (and not just since Deng’s reforms) you can buy Brown’s book. Brown explains how Mao overcame a blockade worse than Iran’s to produce massive growth with equality — Mao clearly had his cake and ate it too, and with his fellow citizens!

But, as cynical Lennon shows, it was always difficult for the West to grasp the moral and ethical nation-inspiring and nation-building revolution Mao personified: they took two very different paths. What is so typically Western is that they insist on pulling China onto their toll road, instead of being content to live and let live in mutual peace.

Lennon famously said that Elvis died when he joined the army, but that’s not true: Elvis died when he joined Hollywood after his discharge, and was no longer a great musician but just another phony actor. When did Lennon die as a revolutionary? I can’t say for sure, but his dismissal of Mao is a good place to start.

No one is going to say Lennon did not succeed wildly in his chosen field, but how long can the judgment of Fairbank and other top Western “scholars” endure when we can so easily prove how they did not respect or understand Chinese culture?

Even though it is fundamental for understanding China, nobody cares about Confucianism in the West – all you will hear about is its yin, feminine, passive counterpart – Daoism. Plenty of Daoism books in the local Western bookstore, for sure – how many on Confucianism? I guess yang, masculine, creative, dynamic, propagating Confucianism doesn’t go well with acid trips, or high-intensity pharmaceutical drugs?

I’m not surprised that the Communist Party is back to promoting Confucianism – the I Ching is not banned in China – and I’m not surprised they prefer it over Daoism, which says, “Cross the great river? What for? What river? Is this thing even on?”

(Clearly I’m even worse scholar of Daoism than I am of Confucianism.)

I’m not amazed that the Western media views Mao as “100% wrong”: The West has been an imperialist, extremist, racist culture for 500 years, and a rabidly anti-socialist one for 100 years.

But I am surprised that Western leftists don’t defend Mao even 30%. Their main problem is: they have not bought books like Brown’s because books like Brown’s simply did not exist until very, very recently. Prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, a book like Brown’s would have gotten you jailed in the West, or worse. The internet is changing this, and that cannot be stopped—only slowed.

Kudos to Brown and eternal kudos to Mao, for being as right and as brave as any of the top politicians of the 20th century.

And no apologies if my picture of Chairman Mao ain’t gonna make it with anyone, anyhow. I know it’s gonna be alright. For China, at least.

<—>

ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
France's Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West's Best Values. He is also the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese. Any reposting or republication of any of my articles is approved and appreciated.

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Ramin’s Substack

JFK: "soft on communism".

“The guy starts a Substack and now he’s a conspiracy theorist!!!” Not at all: Who isn’t thinking, “What if Trump gets JFK-ed before November?”

But who killed JFK, anyway? The answer isn’t mere trivia for conspiracy theorists but obviously says a great, great deal about the nature of who is in power in the American hegemon today.

This article is going to give a clear answer, and it’s one which is never stated even though the answer is obvious: anti-socialists and segregationists (-cum-libertarians). Ask yourself: why is it that these hugely influential groups are never even mentioned as possible killers of JFK?

As you can read in reports of the time, the immediate assumption in 1963 was that segregationists were behind the murder. Anti-socialists were only not named because of their very ubiquitousness in US culture at the time, but this doesn’t mean that anti-socialists were not involved.

I can imagine that on this subject it’s easy for people to click away, so I will get right to the interesting original impetus for this article: to call attention to who was once an intensely important figure but whom only the older readers may remember, Major General Edwin Walker.

To pique your interest as to why this is actually an interesting article about the JFK assassination: The one and only Lee Harvey Oswald tried to assassinate Walker before allegedly assassinating Kennedy. Quite a connection, eh?

Walker only gets more interesting from here… and yet Walker is deliberately forgotten.

He is forgotten in the same way that all far-right figures in liberal democracy are purposely excised from liberal democratic history: from automaker Henry Ford’s founding of modern anti-Semitism, to the founder of Action Française Charles Maurras in France or to the reactionary John Birch Society, the action of these far-right leaders are alleged to have played - after the fact - no role in the ideology of the “right-wing” today, when that’s of course false revisionist history.

(Bob Dylan sang about the the John Birch Society’s anti-Communist paranoia. He wanted to sing that song on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1962 but they rejected its political nature, and Dylan - in one of the first of his seemingly never-ending courageous artistic actions - walked off the set of the star-making, legendary TV show.)

This perpetual amnesia is absolutely critical to understanding Western liberal democracy. We can even go back to the role of French Third Republic “heroes” in their collusion with Bismarck to lay a four-month siege to the Paris Commune in 1871, i.e. these liberal democratic “patriots” committed treason against their own people.

If Americans want to ignore Joe McCarthy, likely the least popular American of the 20th century, then they want to forget about Walker even more. However, he was so well-known at the time that he was the model for the fanatical anti-communist General Jack Ripper in one of the best political satire movies of all time, Dr. Strangelove, by Stanley Kubrick (1964).

Paranoid anti-communist Brig. Col. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) barking orders to seal the base off from intruders or outside communications. Anti-communism cuts very deep in the American mind, and even today many US officers are indoctrinated to regard communism as an "urgent and present danger."

I referred to the insane, sexually-dysfunctional Ripper’s hysterical explanation for launching nuclear weapons on the USSR in the last chapter of my book explaining the Western war on Iranian Islamic Socialism, but with one change, and as a way to explain the fanaticism of the secular West towards a government which dared to give a huge mass of mostly lower-class clerics a partial voice:

“I can no longer sit back and allow ~~Communist~~ (religious) infiltration, ~~Communist~~ (religious) indoctrination, ~~Communist~~ (religious) subversion, and the international ~~Communist~~ (religious) conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”

More on Walker soon, because he may be the one thing you don’t know about the JFK assassination, but what’s vital to impress on readers is this:

In the years around JFK’s assassination there were two dominant political trends: one which feared nuclear annihilation above all, and one which feared the economic redistribution, racial unity and big government of socialism above all (a “better dead than red” anti-socialist hysteria) typified by Walker.

Kennedy was of the former, and that made him “soft on communism”. This refusal to engage in nuclear war in order to defeat socialism is why he was assassinated, and seemingly certainly by collusion between rabid anti-communists and segregationists, both of whom abounded at all levels of US society and US government.

This combination was exemplified by the “dashing” Texan Walker, who should not be deliberately forgotten, and whose role around the JFK assassination was rather spectacularly prominent.

The VERY curious case of General Edwin A. Walker, America’s ‘leading fascist’

Gen. Edwin Walker

Dr. Strangelove wasn’t enough to encapsulate what a curious case Walker was: he was a mix of fanatical anti-communism, rabid Texan segregationism and would be finally outed as an apparently repressed homosexual.

Beginning in 1959 Walker becomes the nation’s leading anti-Communist, following the death of Joe McCarthy in 1957, and the most famous member of the John Birch Society.
In 1961, as his “pro-Blue” (anti-red communist) indoctrination program for US troops was being disbanded, Walker accuses Harry Truman, his foreign policy chief Dean Acheson, Eleanor Roosevelt and others of being “pink”, leading to even more official rebukes.
JFK accepts his resignation offer in 1961, making Walker the only US general to resign during the 20th century. Certainly some motive for revenge, one would think.
Arrested for insurrection in 1962 for promoting the bloody riots in Mississippi over the desegregation of the state university by James Meredith. This required over 30,000 National Guard troops, the most for a single disturbance in US history.
On April 10, 1963 Walker was lightly wounded in an assassination attempt at his home that missed by an inch: Oswald is declared to have been the lone rifleman, and his Russian wife insisted that this attempt was really Oswald’s, but raised doubts about his involvement in the JFK assassination.

(Yes, amid the depth of the Cold War Oswald defected to Russia, got married, then somehow persuaded the US to let him back in, and his wife to boot, and never got arrested… stunning. This incredibly easy globetrotting reminds me of Mohamed Merah in 2012, France’s first “homegrown terrorist”, and who seemed like an obvious French intelligence agent who turned against his handlers. To many it’s obvious that Oswald was working with US intelligence, and that he actually was what he claimed to be: a “patsy” in the JFK murder. However, this alone is a good reason why I’m keeping this article as short as possible - there’s just too much to get into regarding the JFK assassination.)

The Warren Commission (aka the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy) traced classic “Wanted” style ads run in the Dallas Morning News on the day of JFK’s assassination to Walker. The ads read "Wanted for Treason: JFK”.
Pled no contest in 1976 and 1977 for fondling and propositioning male undercover police officers in a public restroom.
The man often accused of seeing “demons and goblins of communism” everywhere died on Halloween in 1993, unmarried and with no children.

These are all real events from history, as amazing as they are, and yet who remembers Walker today?

A final example reflecting Walker’s enormous importance during this era is the award-nominated Hollywood movie Seven Days in May, with stars like Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and Eva Gardner, which was about a military cabal's angry takeover of the government following the presidential negotiation of a disarmament treaty with the USSR. The book was written in 1961 and inspired by Walker and the two most vital political trends of that period: to be “better dead than red” or to make peace to avoid nuclear catastrophe. Only two actual US politicians were mentioned by name (and negatively, of course): the long-dead McCarthy and his popular successor Walker. This is how very prominent Walker was, and yet nobody knows him now.

JFK even vacated the White House to allow the filming of this movie - he knew how important its message was, and he knew exactly which groups were coming for him.

Blaming (war) capitalists for JFK is a way to make all of capitalism-loving America feel complicit

It’s amazing to me that The New York Times still treats the physics-defying “magic bullet theory” and the totally-discredited Warren Commission with complete respect. From an article in September: “As it turns out, if his recollections are correct, the much-discussed ‘magic bullet’ may not have been so magic after all.”

Pathetic. They are such kowtowers to the US uniparty line - such “anti-journalists” - that they print what few could possibly believe. In 1976 - when many who truly remembered the era were actually alive - 80% of Americans disbelieved the Oswald lone gunman theory. You can’t get 80% of Americans to agree on anything political, in my experience. That number has dropped to 65% today - still a major majority - with college-educated Democrats the biggest believers of the official uniparty line, and aren’t these fake-leftists consistently amusing?

Another example of journalistic kowtowing is Life magazine’s refusal to show the Zapruder assassination film - which obviously disproves the lone gunman theory - until forced to by Supreme Court order.

Regardless of this MSM nonsense, the dominant theory in the United States is that John F. Kennedy was killed because he was going to pull out of the Vietnam War, and thus it was the “military industrial complex” which was behind the murder. Castro is occasionally alleged to be involved - which would have been an insane escalation for the leader of a tiny country with a new revolution to focus on. The Chicago mafia is also occasionally supposed to be involved - their vote-rigging is alleged to have tipped the 1960 election in JFK’s favor. Absurd, because the Outfit didn’t have the pull to kill a president, and it’s unthinkable that the US government wouldn’t prosecute but instead cover it up. But the overall idea is: War is big business, but JFK was going to (allegedly) bring peace, which also meant he would dismantle the US spy agencies, and a combination of these forces colluded to kill him.

Indeed, Oliver Stone’s JFK begins with Eisenhower’s famous speech warning of the military-industrial complex — the blame is essentially put on “military capitalists”. Stone never mentions segregationists, or anti-socialists or certainly libertarians, and that’s even though in the early 1960s these were the dominant conservative ideologies raging in America. Stone doesn’t mention “fascists” either, and regardless of your opinion on if such ideologies were fascistic the reality is that none of them openly claimed the mantle of “fascist” - in fact all rejected it - so it’s not accurate, nor even helpfully descriptive, to say “fascists" killed Kennedy, either.

If history repeats itself - at least, according to this reading - then a Trump assassination would be blamed on this same military-industrial complex: for trying to end the war in Ukraine. After all, terribly corrupt Ukraine is poised to join the EU and open itself up to Western capitalist exploitation and 1%-er profiteering more than Vietnam ever potentially could. The same “military capitalists” are still in power, it is widely assumed by those who adhere to this reading of history, and they are apparently opposed to the “fascist” Trump, per the MSM - so there’s another assassination looming, right? This is another column, but this paragraph reminds us that when one doesn’t take a class-based, anti-imperialist view of history the conclusions and even the very terms become totally distorted and useless.

Stone, whose rights to Ukraine on Fire were actually purchased by PressTV, made a critical mistake: by blaming “military capitalists” instead of at least blaming the anti-socialists of the era. Please do not conflate these two groups, as they are not the same thing: the latter includes a huge grassroots and non-bourgeois-class element.

By placing the blame on “military capitalists” the movie JFK, while shocking and groundbreaking, provoked no major changes because it essentially caused Americans to merely shrug their shoulders at JFK’s murder as yet another a byproduct of the capitalist system they love and support despite its awfulness. America is so ardently pro-capitalist that they are still ok with capitalism even if it took out JFK - capitalism takes out so many Americans, after all.

Had Stone openly defended socialism and pinned the blame on the rampant anti-socialist hysteria - his movie doesn’t get made, of course.

But when we openly examine the rabid anti-socialists of the era a very different result is produced: the mass-murdering, international, multi-decade violence of the phrase “soft on communism” gains proper historical focus.

It is not mere “Vietnam War profits” which got JFK killed but America’s fanatical need to reject the sovereignty of other nations - its need to control the minds and hearts of non-Americans - which becomes clear as the real problem, and as a very long-running problem.

The refusal to accept the sovereignty of other nations to go their own way is the fundamental problem of today’s multipolar world, just as it was during the unipolar world (1992-2008), and just as it was during the Cold War, where the USSR was criminalised simply for encouraging other countries to reject capitalism-imperialism.

The JFK murder and cover-up only makes sense via the following paragraph:

The whole “JFK was killed for war profits” is wrong because it ignores the fact that anti-socialism is far more threatening than the profit loss from one imperialist war. It also ignores something as genuinely far-reaching as even mighty Marxism when it comes to the United States context: the concurrent breakup of the 350-year long racial state.

And yet “segregationists” are never accused as JFK’s killer? And yet “anti-communists” are never mentioned either? This is even though these two groups in 1963 were the most combative, the most hysterical and the most willing to kill JFK.

It’s amazing that Stone was allowed to make JFK, but what was the harm? He didn’t point the finger at the true groups which killed JFK. By remembering Edwin Walker we remember the crystal-clear connection between the two groups in the 1960s and their very real perceived threat.

Excising and forgetting this connection - like liberal democracy does with all the crimes of colonialism, or the crimes which led to the disasters of World War I and II - is a fundamental duty of the historical revisionists and apologists of Western liberal democracy and Western capitalism.

Reading this article we are reminded of what ideologies were at the root of JFK’s murder: those who opposed the revolutionary end of the US racial state (segregationists), and those who insisted on imperialist world domination (anti-socialists).

Sorry Mick Jagger, but we’re not all ardent capitalists so we don’t feel the guilt you do: “I shouted out / Who killed the Kennedys? / When after all / It was you and me” ( from “Sympathy for the Devil”). Fight for capitalism and against big government and I’d see how you might feel a bit culpable.

The end of the racial state (segregationism) and hatred of socialism’s big government (libertarianism/anti-socialism) is a multi-century, multi-assassination affair

The Case of General Edwin A. Walker is a book from 1961 which was published by Bircherite (the group began in 1958, and would be headquartered in the Wisconsin birthplace of Joseph McCarthy) and Barry Goldwater supporter Kent Courtney and his nascent Conservative Society of America. It’s a fascinating look into the actual ideologies swirling around during the actual era of JFK’s murder.

The book is a defense of America’s leading fascist, and it is apoplectic that Walker has been rebuked by the army for preaching anti-communism to his troops.

Walker, a General MacArthur devotee, had employed his “pro-Blue” indoctrination program while training troops in the 24th infantry division stationed in Germany. Like Strangelove’s Ripper, it insisted that communist subversion, infiltration and propaganda was being introduced into all aspects of US domestic, military and political life. The book appreciated this obvious overreaction: “General Walker’s Pro-Blue program clearly recognised that only when the American people are awakened to the dangers of Socialist-Communist infiltration in this nation and take political action can the World Communist Conspiracy be destroyed.”

A note here on the terminology which was ubiquitous at the time: these right-wingers were emphatic that communism was definitely not an ideology, philosophy or a political party, but that it was a mere criminal gang bent on domination of the entire world. This is the true origin of the idiotic term “communist conspiracy”. The irony is that this is exactly what Marx correctly accused capitalism of being: collusion of the 1% class to control the world.

Walker lost his commission because he violated the federal Hatch Act of 1939, titled An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities, which forbids employees of the federal government from engaging in partisan political activity.

The book defends Walker and the idea that US troops must be politically indoctrinated into what they are supposed to be fighting for. The author surely didn’t know this, but this is actually a very socialist idea:

Socialist-inspired nations such as Iran, Cuba and China insist on the politicisation of their armies - for them the fear is actually that they become de-politicised, and thus forget the capitalist-imperialist meddling which caused them to be formed in the first place. Contrarily, the US and the West believe their armies must be totally ignorant of and removed from politics… because, of course, were they to learn about pro-99% politics they would immediately overthrow their awful capitalist-imperialist leaders, who want them to be their unreflecting killer robots.

The Case of General Edwin A. Walker is, from cover to cover, a defense of the primary motives of JFK’s assassins: segregationism, anti-socialism and modern American “libertarianism”.

The book is filled with speeches from the two champions of these ideological groups: Strom Thurmond and Barry Goldwater, respectively, two names who are well-known to anyone who follows American politics.

Thurmond: Dixiecrat, champion of segregationism, one of the longest-serving senators ever, had a Black love child and was eulogised by Biden at his funeral (of course).

Goldwater: the most right-wing senator from Arizona ever, and that’s despite John McCain being his successor. Goldwater is the most successful proponent of what I call “Yosemite Sam-ism”: the modern anti-government libertarian movement. This movement led to the election of Ronald Reagan, the grassroots realignment of the Republican Party, deeply influences today’s Trumpism and tarnishes the political viewpoints of many a Bitcoin holder - you cannot understate its political success. Indeed, Goldwater is the political figurehead of libertarianism just as Nietzsche is its philosophical figurehead, with his slogan of “as little state as possible”.

While segregationists failed, it certainly is logical that libertarians have been the most successful political group in the past 40 years - after all, the anti-big government forces in the US succeeded in their attempted coup in 1963 (and 1968), neutering the social democrats of the US.

It’s easy to see why segregationism and libertarianism shared the same ideological goal: opposition to a powerful central state. Both also shared another key ideological tenet: total opposition to the basic welfare programs which have been championed by socialists since 1848 France (slogan back then: “work, bread or lead!”). Heaven forbid poor, recently unslaved Blacks get things like decent affordable housing - surely that would bankrupt American corporations!

However, recall the timeline of Western history: both of these groups were on the losing side of these issues after World War II - in 1963 social democracy was prevailing over mere liberal democracy.

Walker and his cohorts were fighting against this, and after taking out a president their ideologies would truly take control of US society.

The Case of General Edwin A. Walker gives us invaluable insights on how the 2nd Red Scare developed, but let’s return briefly to the 1st US Red Scare, 1917-21.

Of course, the Russian Revolution is the impetus, but this era’s American crimes are covered up or apologised away. Mainstream historians say this era ran from 1917-20, but it wasn’t until 1921 that the Socialist Party of America’s presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, was finally released from prison?

The New York Times had to report on rumours Ford was financially backing the German Nazis; Ford gave the Protocols of Zion its first English mass production.

I haven’t read either of those two texts, but I’ll assume Ford combines radical anti-socialism (those ungrateful autoworkers of mine!) with an inland Michigander’s hatred for Wall Street. Hitler combined radical anti-socialism with the eugenics-inspired idea (so very crucial in understanding Hitler) that 1917 had a racial, and not ideological, basis because Jews and Bolshevism were one and the same, to him.

Also incredibly repressed in allegedly freedom-respecting America is the 2nd Great Red Scare, exemplified by McCarthyism and which is supposed to run from 1947-1957. However, after reading this article you should find it easy to agree that a far better ending to this era would be in 1963 with the assassination of JFK.

From the Walker book: “Prior to 1954, anti-Semitic groups seemed to outnumber the few responsible and respectable anti-communist groups or publications then in existence.”

On the 1954 televised McCarthy-Stevens anti-communist hearings: “The whole nation watched in their living rooms as a new element entered into the fight against Communism. Here was an anti-communist fighter who was not anti-Semitic!”

The author asserts that the McCarthy hearings made anti-socialism a grassroots movement for this generation: “The result of the McCarthy hearings was that millions of straight-thinking, non-bigoted (i.e. not anti-Jew) Americans woke up to the dangers of Communist infiltration.”

However, it was not just the televised McCarthy hearings that inflamed many Americans - it was the fact that the US was losing, and big time. It’s impossible to understand the JFK assassination without grasping the predominant right-wing sentiment that socialists kept on beating them. The vital reality is that right-wingers viewed their contemporary times like this:

“At the end of World War II, the United States was the most powerful nation on earth, respected by friend and foe alike. By 1961 the prestige of the United States had sunk to the lowest level in the history of this country. During the past decade the nations of the world have witnessed the once-powerful United States bend its knee in appeasement to the Soviet Union, and retreat step by ignominious step before all communist aggression or threat of aggression.”

This statement includes so very many socialist victories since WWII: the 1949 Chinese revolution, the victory of North Korea, the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the 1961 failed Bay of Pigs Invasion, and it would soon encompass the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, a major socialist victory because it saw Cuba firmly freed from US invasion in return for not stationing Soviet missiles. (From a Latin America-centric point of view JFK appears to have been killed in order to preserve the Monroe Doctrine.) The fanatical anti-communists had reasons to be apoplectic, and the very real view of the right wing was, to continue quoting the Walker book, “…abject appeasement of Communism has become the permanent policy of the Kennedy administration,” which rightly feared nuclear war more than socialism.

Indeed, the critical understanding behind the JFK murder was not capitalist profits but this: Did one fear nuclear annihilation or socialism more? If the answer wasn’t socialism you might get your face put on a Wanted ad in Texas.

The fundamental idea rejected by JFK was that the US should hit communism with “everything we’ve got”, including nuclear weapons, which made him “soft on communism”. Furthermore, when we combine this hysterical anti-communism with the hysteria induced on the cultural front - the break-up of the 350-year racial state - we get people who were willing to commit a political coup to forestall the obvious desire for change.

Profits from Vietnam? Mere peanuts….

Conclusion: The individual killers aren’t known but their reasons clearly are

The mafia, Castro, the end of the Vietnam military-industrial complex - such things pale in comparison to the societal complexity of the death of the US racial state and the fanatical anti-socialist movement in the United States.

The problem was not merely “war is business” but the very heart of US culture - the demand of all imperialists to control, and the demand of all capitalists to extract maximum profit.

One problem with this theory of mine: the killing of Kennedy by segregationists typified by Walker actually increased the breaking-up of the racial state. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was pushed through by JFK’s successor, the Texan Lyndon Baines Johnson. How can we explain this?

Firstly, let’s recall that JFK voted against the Civil Rights Bill in 1957, and that he said little about civil rights before winning the presidency (and that he was the first US president to ramp up the conflict in Vietnam). It’s possible he changed - Kennedy devotees insist that he saw the light and was going to lead a new America - but a more accurate guess is this: nobody in the 1% really wanted a change to the status quo, but the racial status quo was indeed forced to change thanks to unstoppable grassroots agitation by the 99%.

Ending segregation was the price which had to be paid in order for these two forces to keep power - and it worked.

The 2nd Great Red Scare - surely it must include the assassination of JFK, as anti-socialist sentiment was so clearly involved. Segregation: Scholars often call the 1960s the “2nd Civil War” because this is when the 1st US Civil War finally reached a conclusion - rights were observed for African-Americans, finally.

Robert F. Kennedy would be killed five years later, in what certainly seems like a repeat created by the two same forces I have described.

The only person close enough to put the bullet a half-inch from RFK’s ear was security guard Thane Eugene Caesar, a known far-righter who had publicly said he believed that if elected, RFK would have, "sold the country down the road to the commies or minorities like his brother did.”

He just described anti-socialism and segregationism - these are the exact two groups I have been describing, no?

RFK’s son, the 2024 presidential candidate RFK Jr., doesn’t believe the lone gunman theory for his father's death and does believe that Caesar was the second shooter.

A book from this year which looks interesting for those who want to learn more about Walker is The Insurrectionist: Major General Edwin A. Walker and the Birth of the Deep State Conspiracy. I’m not all that interested because I think the US army has become so depoliticised that I don’t know who could possibly rise to the level of Walker’s prominence as a right-winger today? General Mark Milley rose to tremendous non-wartime prominence by opposing Trump, but who’s the true right-winger among those two? Which of the two US parties isn’t right wing and is actually in favor of mere social democracy? If any uber-right-wing military man does rise to prominence then everyone will start unearthing Walker.

A book which does look worth reading is Dallas 1963, which examines the epicentre of American extremism and often called the “City of Hate”. The month before JFK was killed Walker led a shocking anti-internationalist attack on visiting Adlai Stevenson, the American ambassador to the United Nations. Here’s a brief excerpt from a New Republic article:

“One man stands up and chants: ‘Kennedy will get his reward in hell. Stevenson is going to die. His heart will stop, stop, stop. And he will burn, burn, burn.’

People begin streaming into the aisles, holding American flags upside down, a tactic they have learned from General Walker to signal a nation in distress or under attack. Halfway through Stevenson’s speech, a group of Walker’s commandos dart behind the stage and pull on a rope. The large banner that reads WELCOME ADLAI flips down to reveal another message in huge letters: UN RED FRONT.

One Stevenson supporter turns to another in disbelief: ‘This must be what it was like in Munich during the Beer Hall Putsch.’

More scuffles are breaking out, but Stevenson is insisting on staying on stage—and directly addressing the extremists in Dallas:

‘I understand that some of these fearful groups are trying to establish a United States Day in competition with United Nations Day. This is the first time I have heard that the United States and the United Nations are rivals.’

The assassination of JFK - and RFK and MLK: the root cause was obviously anti-socialism and not just “military-industrial capitalism as usual”.

This article should remind why the US views war with China as “inevitable” - “better dead than red” prevailed in 1963 and has never been pushed out of office.

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France's Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West's Best Values. He is also the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditionalChinese..

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Mourners pay their respects upon the passing of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on 3 June 1989. The West could never understand him nor what he represented.

“I wasn’t thinking of me, I was thinking of the country. You know who I blame? The old Ayatollah, for calling us the Great Satan. It’s like he put the evil eye on us and we shrank. He really stuck it to us, somehow.”

John Updike, Rabbit At Rest, 1990

It can’t be denied that the English-American worldview/alliance was the sole victor of all three of the most impactful revolutions in modern history.

In the French anti-monarchical revolution, the WWI and WWII liberal- and social-democratic revolutions and the Soviet socialist-democratic revolution the only winner of all three was the Anglo-American world. This fact-based historical analysis was proffered in 1996 by Italian communist historian Domenico Losurdo, and can be found in English in War and Revolution: Rethinking the 20th Century.

“The sole political entity to emerge regularly victorious from all three conflicts was the Anglo-American world. The transfiguration of the Anglo-American political tradition and, in particular, of the USA is the consecration of this fact,” he wrote.

He doesn’t specifically clarify, but when he writes “consecration of this fact” I assume he means to make it universal, permanent and sacred (unchallengeable).

This would describe the role of any contemporary historian regularly found in the mainstream media. Niall Ferguson, to give one example, has risen to prominence by demanding world domination for Anglophone (English-speaking) culture. It’s a theme constantly echoed in ever-reactionary publications like The Economist. Eugenics is out, post-Hitler - supremacy is now linguistic.

Even though the United Kingdom left the European Union, English is still its bureaucratic lingua franca.

In 2013 whistleblower Edward Snowden’s intelligence leaks brought the Five Eyes spy ring to the fore - Anglophone collusion between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US. We can bookend these revelations with the 2021 “stab in the back” of France by Australia on a €50 billion defense deal scotched by the US - the Anglophones stick together, for as much as the French rail against the “Anglo-Saxon world”.

Since they can’t rely on eugenics anymore it’s the English-speaking world which is now elevated, and this helps explain Losurdo’s essential thesis: The Anglophone world engages in revisionist history to elevate the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the US Revolution of 1776 while falsely and immorally attempting to liquidate humankind’s “revolutionary tradition” for everyone after. Liquidation of the revolutionary tradition - what year does it stop for you?

It’s a superb and obviously true analysis: From the French Revolution, to the completely ignored yet undoubtedly revolutionary American abolitionists (William Lloyd Garrison on the 1787 US Constitution, which codified the racial state: “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell”.) to the Bolsheviks, all revolutionaries post-1776 are inevitably labeled by Anglophones as a “virus” or “madmen”. Over and over, the problem is biological. Today, not speaking English is to be as excised from intellectual existence as a doomed pagan in 5th-century Byzantium.

While the two Anglophone revolutions were advancements - away from absolute monarchy and towards democracy, if only partially - Losurdo notes (in an analysis which is now branded as “wokeism” by political conservatives) the only way the US and English Revolutions can appear in a positive light is if the experiences of the Native Americans, Blacks, Irish and Scottish are written out of the history of these revolutions. Similarly, World Wars I and II only appear like a Wilsonian crusade to make the world “safe for democracy” if all of colonialism - Anglophone, French and, crucially, Hitler’s openly-declared plan for colonisation of Eastern Europe - is written out of history.

Such is the sham “history” taught in liberal democracies to continually liquidate the revolutionary tradition.

Prophet Mohammad’s insistence on replacing Byzantium’s liquidation of pagans with tolerance for those not called by God to Islam is one of the many political revolutions he’s responsible for, but that’s another column, and it’s one certainly will never find in a liberal democratic syllabus either. The point is: we see why Western history is so unpersuasive to the latter half described in Ferguson’s book, The West and The Rest.

What Ferguson mostly rails about now - to profitable Anglophone acclaim - is the alleged threat of Islam. But this is many decades after the evil eye of Khomeini - who continued the incredibly shocking honesty and unflinching bravery of fellow Muslim Malcolm X - so what’s the connection?

Just as Losurdo joined the small but plausible chorus calling WWI and WWII the “Second Thirty Years’ War”, we can see now - as Losurdo could not, especially as he was writing 5 years before 9/11 - that the Iranians kicked off the fourth major multi-decade historical trend.

As I wrote in my latest book on the Yellow Vests: it is revisionist, liberal democratic folly to separate the Wars of the French Revolution from the wars of the Napoleonic era: 1789-1815 saw seven different European coalitions to topple revolutionary France. Twenty-four years to subdue the first modern revolution, and only reactionary England fought in all of them.

The Cold War lasted from 1945 to 1991. The US abolitionist movement effectively lasted over a hundred years - it’s not as if US Blacks actually got liberal democratic rights in 1865, but more like 1965. The Palestinians may take as long as this, as they are nearly as disenfranchised, debilitated and dominated as the Blacks in the US were.

The battle for modern human rights in the Muslim world - which has the misfortune of being placed on the site of today’s Potosi mines… but only if 16th-century ships ran on silver - first counter-attacked the Anglophone hegemon in 1979. In 2017 the tide began to turn against the imposition of puppets in Syria, and with Russian assistance. Today, Hamas has counter-attacked the West’s colonial outpost of Israel - more Israelis (85%) speak English than Canadians (83%).

The eventual victory of Palestine is certainly assured, but we are seeing now - as Losurdo could not - that it will coincide with the certain rise of China, the certain establishment of Russia’s insistence on a multipolar world and the likely failure of the Anglophone-led liberal democratic project of the European Union.

2023 may be the tipping point - the end of the Anglophone run of success in the most important global political trends. How can they be on the right side of history when they’re still in favor of not just monarchy and colonialism but even an unregulated 1%? Perhaps history will say this year’s failure of the Ukrainian counter-offensive - which revealed the military-industrial-technological demise of the West - was the start of the end?

But to go beyond the military to the cultural-political - and thus the start of the beginning - we require a successful popular revolution: thus, the global political trend was kicked off by the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution, which reasserted the primacy of morality in government.

Iran is not insisting that this morality in your government be Islamic, simply that there be some morality: “No more 1%-led, Great Satan-type of behavior, at least over here and at least by us.” Oligarchic, elitist liberal democracy fails - has always failed, will always fail - this test.

Socialist democracies don’t fail this test because they are truly revolutionary - finally overturning the tip of the pyramid via intellectual calls to morality which end eugenics-based or ancestor-based privileges, both of which are mere inheritances.

Indeed, modern secularists would rail against Robespierre for saying, “The sole foundation of civil society is morality. All the societies waging war against us are based on crime.” This was indeed true of those fighting the French Revolution just as much as it was true of those fighting the Iranian, Cuban or Chinese Revolutions.

More is to be said on Losurdo, superb critic of liberal democracy, but Updike’s Rabbit at Rest won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 and he’s often considered the greatest postwar American writer. I like his dialogue, but can do without his tedious, essentially sensual-superficial narration of American suburban life (unlike Nabokov there are countless unessential sentences), and especially his depressing, morally empty worldview. He might be so domestically esteemed because his world is totally of the encapsulated (entombed?) individual and never social - so how can he be a revolutionary? If a personal sacrifice is called for then liquidate away, Rabbit would surely say.

The main character of Rabbit would be resurrected - in name only, as there is zero connection between the two characters - in what is nevertheless the best “white trash” movie of its era, 8 Mile, starring the trailer-park character Eminem.

Updike isn’t all that funny, but when he is it’s mostly in the American “cringe humour” type of way: we cringe at Rabbit’s awful “innocent” self-centredness, his shameless unwillingness to change and his perpetual immaturity, finally laid bare by a Japanese Toyota work superior. Writing in 1990 it’s seems likely that Updike was unaware that the 1985 Plaza Accord cemented Japan as part of the West, i.e. a nation where one’s leaders engage in the colonisation of their own people for the benefit of themselves and the international 1% of Marx.

However, Updike certainly was astute in grasping the American cultural impact of the Iranian Revolution, and I did appreciate his take on France:

“A computer is like a Frenchman. It seems real smart until you know the language. Once you know the language, you realise it’s dumb as hell. Quick, sure. But quick ain’t the same as smart.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. His latest book is France's Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West's Best Values. He is also the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.

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Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact.

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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

I’m back in the EU, site of the 21st century’s biggest political disaster

RAMIN MAZAHERI

Why is the biggest political story of our era so underreported?

The alleged solution of “social democracy” goes way back to the 1890s - what we have witnessed hasn’t been the “death of communism” but the “death of social democracy” instead.

Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact.

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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Mao’s famous Cultural Revolution swim across the Yangzi River finally explained

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Why is it never ‘anti-socialists’ & ‘segregationists’ (and libertarians) who killed JFK?

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