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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2019-10
Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
The U.S. attack against Venezuela triggered riots in Haiti. Haiti received oil and credit from Venezuela under very preferential conditions. The money saved was supposed to go into a special PetroCaribe fund to be spend on social projects in Haiti. When the U.S. enacted sanctions against Venezuela, Haiti stopped paying and the cheap oil flow ended. The fund was looted by local politicians. When the government then supported the U.S. coup attempt against Venezuela the people had enough and took to the streets.
BajoElCieloDeMoscú @VuelvaLaURSS – 17:28 utc – 14 Feb 2019
Translated from Spanish
The Haitian people have been protesting for five days against the dictator who supports Guaidó in Venezuela, Jovenel Moises. In 5 days, the repressive forces of this criminal have murdered 52 Haitians and left 247 wounded. So you can see the streets of Puerto Principe, full of bodies.
The video attached to the above tweet shows five civilians, presumably dead, laying in the road.
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A former chief of staff Nicolas Maduro, now a professor at Science Po in Paris, warns in an interview that the situation in Venezuela could easily escalate into a civil war.
Q: One of the things that have been said by the opposition very clearly is that there will be new elections. That is part of their plan.
A: And what guarantees that the departure of Maduro doesn't create a civil war, for instance? The reality of Venezuela is that it is a very polarized country. It is totally unrealistic or irresponsible to think or to assume that there are all the guarantees for Venezuela to be in a peaceful situation. In order to be an election, you have to agree on the terms of that election. When will the election be held? Who can be allowed to run for those elections? And that's exactly the problem — saying there will be elections is assuming that the problem is solved before even addressing it.
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Greg Grandin on sovereignty and Latin America: What’s at Stake in Venezuela?
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Other stuff:
– "It's all about the Benjamins baby." That tweet by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, and the reaction to it, put new focus on the Zionist lobby. M.J. Rosenberg: This Is How AIPAC Really Works – WSJ: Aipac raises more than $100 million a year, which it spends on lobbying politicians
– A longread by Matthew Hoh, who resigned over Obama's 2009 surge in Afghanistan: Time for Peace in Afghanistan and an End to the Lies
– A Chinese anime video series about the life and work of Karl Marx: The Leader (with subtitles in 7(!) languages)
Use as open thread …
@ Posted by: bevin | Feb 17, 2019 6:00:57 PM | 81
Karl Liebknecht voted against in the second vote (according to German Law of the time, war credits had to be renewed from time to time). After his initiative, others followed, but it was never a significant group. In the first one, it was unanimous. For that he would pay with his life at the hands of the Freikorps, in 1918.
@ Posted by: Zachary Smith | Feb 17, 2019 6:22:02 PM | 82
Read the original documents of the Operation Barbarossa (most commenters here read German, so I don’t think it should be a problem to read them). It is simply nuts: it doesn’t have any military goal. It just speculates that, once they reached the Arkhangelsk-Moscow line, the Soviets would magically surrender. It was a suicide mission from the beginning. Either that, or the Nazis really believed the USSR was some kind of abortion of nature/inferior race that would simply fold at the first strike.
The USSR also fought WWII on two fronts: after Khalkin Gol, the Eastern frotier remained heavily guarded, draining significant resources. Even then, the USSR never used more than 65% of its total manpower the whole war — the Germans were not even close of depleting Soviet manpower.
Lend Lease only arrived at 1943 (i.e. after Stalingrad), and its most important contribution was in the counter-offensive. It gave the fuel and the trucks the USSR needed to advance fast through the territory it lost previously and to march quickly to Berlin. The trucks were important because, in WWII they filled a very important vacuum in the European logistics, which was the intermediate stage between the train and the armies on the field. Horses (!!) were still largely used for that task. But the Germans also suffered from that problem, so it was an equalizer.
If it wasn’t for Lend Lease, the Soviet wouldn’t be able to counterattack that fast, and almost certainly wouldn’t get to Berlin in time. The war would take some more years and many more lives would be lost. But they certainly wouldn’t have lost the War to Germany, who also had the same problems of overstretching and lack of fuel.
Sure, you could paint the apocalyptic scenario of nuclear weapons. The Germans were close by 1945. But so was everybody else. Japan actually built one at the very end of the War — but didn’t have the means to deliver it (it was just an academic matter). The USA, as we already know, did it and use it. The Soviets were more behind, but not by much.
@ Posted by: Pft | Feb 17, 2019 10:15:13 PM | 89
The Third Reich was not a mixed economy by any stretch of imagination. The fact Germany was already a superpower by the turn of the 20th Century meant it already had its territory fully industrialized and covered by railroads. That “inheritance” the Third Reich received from the Weimar Republic, coupled with over the top memoirs by fallen Nazi Field Marshalls (ofthen, written to save face pre-Nürnberg), gave the allies the illusion it was a well-coordinated, highly centralized economy, with Hitler as a dictator with absolute power.
But that’s not what the documentation tells us. The means of production were never nationalized: the industrialists remained at the top of the German social pyramid, with Hitler negotiating with them as equals and frequently ceding to their interests (the main point of discord in the war was the cession of the high-skilled workers to the front). Contracts were paid by the market, the German industrial machine profit as usual, a la Pentagon. Most of the concentration camp prisoners were given to the industrialists as cheap workforce (those bizarre stories, e.g. Mengele, were only to prisoners who were incapable/refused to work). Germany’s productive sector remained in firm private hands the whole time — nationalization never crossing Hitler’s mind.
Modern social-democracies(e.g. Nordics, UK, France) are not socialist countries because there’s no transition in place. They don’t aim to achieve communism, but instead preach socialism is a mere moral code to give capitalism “a human face”. That’s why modern China is socialist (read their five-year plan and long term goals) and, say, Sweden is not.
I don’t know Deng Xiaoping’s life in detail. But it would surprise me if he really did meant what he said the way you interpret this quote: his reforms are a clear rip-off of Lenin’s NEP (albeit, justice be made, Lenin called the NEP “State Capitalism”), and the Chinese government has drawn a clear path to socialism by 2050. He also crushed the color revolution of 1989 (if he was really a closeted capitalist, he would’ve capitulated to the riots). By all accounts he was a brilliant socialist thinker (that “cat” quotation is one of my favorites and encapsulates well how a true socialist should think in practical terms).
I think what he meant was that, since socialism is a thing for the future, nobody in his time knew exactly how it would pan out in the real world. This is true to any new system: capitalism took some 300 years to get to its actual, perfected form (which we call, nowadays, “Western Democracy”).
Posted by: vk | Feb 18 2019 12:13 utc | 105
Churchill
The British, specifically the English, to this day regard the knighted drunk, Sir Winston Churchill as being a national hero, indeed a man who had almost single handedly, by the power of his own will, saved the British nation and rescued her imperilled population in their darkest time. To this day both of his grandsons, either serving as elected Conservative Members of Parliament, or formally so, recall his name and that harrowing time during which he served as Prime Minister, to elevate their own rather insignificant contributions to British society and to the public discourse.
The truth of the matter is somewhat more disquieting, more disturbing and indeed the similarities between the Sir Winston Churchill of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that of his grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames M.P, are disconcerting to say the least. It seems that in his old age, the Honourable Member and knight of the realm, Sir N. Soames, seems to be intent on demonstrating how similar their statures are – both morally, intellectually and physically.
Churchill senior had written that,
“the unforgivable sin of Hitler’s Germany was to develop a new system by which the international bankers were deprived of their profits.”
Not that Herr Hitler’s regime had sinned on account of it’s ill-treatment and murder of ethnic minorities, for Churchill neither cared for the the ethnic minorities of the states of Western Europe, nor for the non-Europeans who populated the other continents of the world, much as his descendant, Sir Nicholas Soames M.P doesn’t care in 2018, as he clearly demonstrated recently when he shouted across the floor of the chamber of the House of Commons in the British Parliament at the leader of the Scottish National Party, Mr Ian Blackford, to “go home to Skye”, the island constituency in Scotland where he was born and whose people he represents in the Parliament.
Bigotry is something that the Churchill family members have espoused through their oratory, their writing and their actions since the time of Queen Victoria, who herself, as a descendant of a German and who had married a German, was thus from an ethnic minority herself. Winston Churchill opined in the 1940’s, that people,
“must understand that this war is not against Hitler or National Socialism, but against the strength of the German people, which is to be smashed once and for all, regardless of whether it is in the hands of Hitler or a Jesuit Priest.”
Winston the elder had no qualms about the use of poison gas to eliminate large numbers of human beings, for he himself had ordered the use of it (for the purposes of ascertaining it’s lethality) against the Kurdish population of British occupied Mesopotamia in the early years of the twentieth century. To Churchill, the Kurds were not to be considered as human beings of the order and of the value as Europeans, they were sub-human. During the Second World War it was Winston Churchill who had personally signed the order on the sixth of July 1944 for mustard gas bombs to be dropped on German cities by the Royal Air Force (whose disagreeable commanders eventually had their views taken into consideration) and had two million anthrax filled shells readied for use. He lamented that what had been acceptable methods of warfare in the decades gone by were no longer fashionable nor favourable to governments or their military top brass. Of course it was only after the Second World War had ended that the atrocities of the Nazi regime came to light. It is clearly evident that Churchill would have used such weapons had he gotten his way. On the day he had signed the order to use gas weapons on the civilian population of Germany, an entry in the diary of a serving British officer, who had spent that evening reporting to his Prime Minister, stated that the Prime Minister was blind drunk.
It was noted by President Roosevelt of the United States, Joseph Stalin and the Fuhrer of Germany, Adolf Hitler, that Winston Churchill was, what would be considered by the standards of today’s medical professionals, an alcoholic. All his decisions were taken whilst he was heavily intoxicated, for he was in a state of perpetual drunkenness. A man neither of sound nor sober mind. His mental condition aside, he was a fraud on many levels. Not the John Bull British nationalist that he styled himself as being and that others have decided to perpetuate since he passed away.
To sustain the lavish lifestyle enjoyed by the English aristocrats of the day, the class to which he considered himself to belong, one which was unsustainable on his £500 per annum salary as an ordinary backbench Member of Parliament, he would sell his watercolour paintings marked with the signature of a famous French impressionist painter to significantly increase their value, a fact that came to the attention of the American President, Franklin Roosevelt. He received payments from the Czechoslovak government to press their case with both the American and the British governments, at a time when the issue of the German speaking minority living in the Sudetenland of that state, recently constructed under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, was a pressing issue facing the governments of the Weimar Republic of Germany. He took money from wealthy Jewish financiers, despite himself being an anti-semite, to advocate and advance their aspirations. Large sums of money – even by today’s standards.
Sir Winston Churchill was no hero. He was a drunk, a gambler and a bigot, like his son Randolph and his grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames. The British imperialist that cost Britain her empire. A man who sent men to their deaths in their millions but who fled London to the country mansions of his friends when the decrypted German codes alerted his security services of an approaching air raid. A man who bankrupted the country so that the surviving soldiers who had fought for it would return home to virtual poverty and would have to raise their children under a strict regime of rationing and the inevitable poverty that that would mean for them. Sir Winston died, as will Sir Nicholas Soames, a millionaire and a hypocrite.
Posted by: Steve D Keith | Feb 18 2019 12:45 utc | 107
Back to the Future
George Orwell was born in Bihar, India. The name Bihar comes from the root word, Vihar, which means temple. An auspicious place. A place where we can understand the idea of time; the past, present and future as one. Mr Orwell certainly achieved this feat; perhaps destined to by virtue of the circumstances of his birth. He was, or at least his writings were, prophetic. He could see the reality of how the world was, because of how the people were and consequently he could see how the future would unravel, logically. He was not wrong then and he is not wrong in these darkened days in which we are dying.
In his masterpiece, 1984, he introduces us to a dystopian reality that has encompassed the globe; three fascistic power blocs of the northern hemisphere, Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia fighting each other for the resources of the southern hemisphere. London was the capital of Airstrip One, an offshore island and part of the superstate of Oceania (North America and the British Isles). She was at endless war with her neighbours, rivals and enemies in the battle for global domination, Eurasia (Europe and Russia) and East Asia (China and the states that border her today).
The debacle which has enveloped the United Kingdom and the European Union over the former’s decision to withdraw from the latter’s club, has created the opportunity for two thirds of this fiction to become real facts, eventually and inevitably forcing the hand of the Peoples Republic to realise a historical belief and vision, espoused many years before on the BBC’s Dateline London programme by a Chinese TV journalist (London correspondent, probably), that if it looks Chinese, then it is Chinese. Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos would return to the bosom of the motherland, as Austria, the Sudatenland etc was annexed to the German fatherland.
All this because Russia and the Europeans would have come together, probably quite naturally, in response to Great Britain and Ireland having joined as the fifty first, second, third and fifty fourth states, of the United States. These four ancient nations will find no other way to resolve the #Brexit conundrum and they will see this as the only logical option – an English speaking block, based on common free trade ideals, that guarantees their sovereignty. It would appeal to each of the four nations, the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish, perhaps for different reasons but they would be accepting because their national ego’s will be satisfied with this international recognition of each of their sovereign rights.
There is a certain historical inevitability about the whole thing. As a man who spent the formative years of his life in India, he will be aware of the darkness of the age in which we live, an age that the Hindus know as the age of Kali, Kal Yug. An age of darkness and destruction, of deviance and distrust. It is an age that has come before and that will come again, just as the golden ages have come and in time must pass again, back into history. Each has their time and their place. The creatures born in such an age must accept it and refuse to capitulate to it’s mesmerising illusions. Of course they won’t – it is all too mesmeric, the illusion too beautiful. The illusion of self, of nation, of country, of power, of right and of wrong. It is the illusion of the physical, of the material, of the possibilities of each, that will drive nations together into the power structures from which there will be no escape until the Armageddon, that is theoretically believed in by many of the participants, will arrive and the age will turn, again.
@K_el_ph
Posted by: Steven Keith | Feb 20 2019 9:42 utc | 163
1984 – Again!
Many among the Christian evangelical community in the United States believe that armageddon will be upon us when Jerusalem falls to the Slavic peoples. If that is the case, then President Putin is essentially in Damascus already! And rightfully so, I might add – he was after all, invited by the legally recognised president of the sovereign republic of Syria. Who invited who does not amount to a hill of beans to the well read and worldly wise eyes of the millions of men, women and children beholden to their newly found faith. They are willing and able to kill for it. As are those, it is fair to say, who find themselves on the other side of this, self bestowed and self constructed battle for the soul of humanity. When people believe in something and believe in it so fervently, then they can find themselves writing a future that fits for them, fits their idea of the future, their community’s future, according to their values, traditions and beliefs. History would record them as having made a conscious and irrational bee line towards a head on collision with a counter thought; an enemy, and thus, to their own mutually assured destruction. At each stage the doomed traveler would be so convinced of the certainty of his or her truth that he would never deviate from the programmed flight path. All sides have bought into a version of this program, one that has been merely tinkered with to cater for the variety of flavours of national, ethnic and religious sentiment.
North Americans and the Europeans sing from similar hymn sheets on this matter, albeit belonging to markedly different denominations of the congregation. They won’t always be choristers in the same choir. The Europeans may well yet find themselves singing with the Russians much sooner than they think. The British, together with their neighbours in Ireland, who will eventually over time find themselves to be reconciled and reunited, will inevitably lend their full range of choral talents, if not always harmonious, to their linguistic and cultural kin across the Atlantic. Younger, less religiously minded, secular souls are not so interested in continuing the sectarian divisions as their forebears were. It is about practicality and history, dear boy!
In this, the age of Kali, it can be expected that the majority of people in all societies, everywhere, have succumbed to the illusion of the self and follow the script, read out for them day and night, on ever glossier, faster, shallower and increasingly trivialising television. Cyberspace the same. Very few people, who together make up the nation states that would form the three blocks of super states that were predicted by the author George Orwell in his classic work, 1984, have any real understanding of the other; those who are on the other side of the argument. In spite of the connected global world, the ordinary men and women know less and less of the world beyond their bubble of friends. Politicians in parliaments are willing to quote from and believe the narrative of the very same media outlets that on other issues they vehemently disagree with and claim (rightfully) to be state propagandists, the enemy of real news, colluders with the political establishment. They are willing to go along with this propagandising even on matters of war and peace, lives and deaths. Many deaths.
In the 1930’s two groups of fanatics, each believing in their own racial superiority, God gifted, they assumed, each with dreams of an ethnically pure homeland, each with an ancestral fatherland being imaginatively expanded to the maximum that their understanding of history would allow for. These were the National Socialists of the Weimar Republic and the Zionist Party of Germany. To further each others ambitions they signed an agreement, the Haavara Agreement in 1933 which enabled tens of thousands of German Jews to emigrate to the British Protectorate of Palestine. The agreement was by necessity cancelled upon the outbreak of the second war in a couple of decades between the United Kingdom and Germany. What came after is the tragic tale of ghettos and murder.
Is it not then somewhat ironic, that the state of Israel, itself established as a direct consequence of the war against fascism and the forcible movement of European Jews from their homes into fenced off ghettos and concentration camps before their merciless murder, should itself be effectively ghettoising it’s own population; walling them off from the world and actively encouraging world Jewry to up sticks and resettle within the walls of this tiny and ever more embattled, overcrowded and ever drier strip of land? Surrounded by the sea and it’s enemies, and friends, each with their own agendas and all of them believers in a biblical armageddon.
Those who follow any of the Abrahamical religions and consider that their texts be interpreted literally, consider that the end of the world is nigh, that judgement day will swiftly be upon us. Even stranger that the current regime in Tel Aviv seems to be intent on cramming into the crucible as many co-religionists as can be covered with a tiled roof. Stranger still, is that not one of the protagonists can see that they are each journeying toward collision from their respective starting points, toward the other, fuelled by the fervour of half remembered history and blinded by social expectation.
Each of them forgetting the lessons of Mr G Orwell, whose prophetic words they surely have all read. All the factors are in place. The theatre, the actors, the audience waiting with baited breath. All waiting for the curtain to rise, for the show to begin. Perhaps too, they have forgotten what their own mother’s must have told them, ‘don’t be too quick to rush to judgement.’
@k_el_ph
Posted by: Steve Keith | Feb 20 2019 16:56 utc | 164
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