This year was very difficult, and this is the most difficult blog post I’ve ever written.

On June 13th, my beloved Uncle Shekhar died. He wasn’t just my uncle—people used to joke about how close we were. People would joke that I was his eldest daughter. I was devastated. But if it were the death of my uncle alone, I wouldn’t have been dysfunctional.

The very next day, the man who had been my partner for the past two years decided to f*ck someone else instead of staying and comforting me. As I was quickly trying to get to my uncle’s funeral, he went missing. I boarded the airplane. When I landed, I was in for a great surprise. As soon as I took my phone out of airplane mode, I was hit with a pornographic video from the other woman. I was in an airport, and I didn’t know how to process it. So I did what I naturally did when I had a problem I couldn’t solve and tried to call my beloved Uncle Shekhar. But this time, only to realize that he was gone.

The man I thought I loved, and who I mistakenly believed loved me, showed me less compassion than random strangers. A flight attendant on Finnair saw my grieving face and moved me up to business class so that I could cry privately. To add insult to injury, the other woman, as if to dance on my uncle’s grave, sent me extremely disgusting messages (Click here, to read, I would rather not relive this)

This dual trauma and betrayal hit me hard. I was unable to grieve for my uncle because every time I tried, the other betrayal would invade my memories. I was unable to write, research, or do the other tasks that made Historic.ly possible.

After a while, I was able to get my PTSD treated and psychologically improve enough to be functional. I decided to reinterpret the trauma as a final gift from my uncle from heaven, showing me the true nature of the man who was clearly unworthy. I have so many good memories of my uncle, like the time he took me to Disneyland.

For those of you who stayed as paid subscribers during this time, there are no words to thank you.

For those of you who chose to unsubscribe, I would like to apologize. I am really sorry. I let you down. For that, I have no excuses, and I seek to rebuild your trust. I hope you will reconsider and become a subscriber again.

I hope that in the past week or two, I have made up for the lack of content. I intend to continue 2026, strongly with my series on every anti-communist talking point debunked:

I would also like to finish my series on Noam Chomsky which has been a long time coming.

Luckily, I was finally able to get my hands on the domain name historic.ly, and I will be transferring the site there with more content within the first few weeks of January.

I also hope to finish my book I have been working on for the past few years: “A People’s History of the Soviet Union.”

Most importantly, I wish everyone a happy new year.

He began his political writing through activism against the Vietnam War, and his first book-length publication, American Power and the New Mandarins, is a 400-plus-page monograph that incorporates his early political essays, including “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” and “On Resistance.” In this work, Chomsky argues that American power is no longer exercised primarily by the older class of robber barons and industrial capitalists, but increasingly by a technocratic stratum embedded in institutions of expertise. Power, he suggests, resides in “the research corporation, the industrial laboratories, the experimental stations, and the universities…the scientists, the mathematicians, the economists, and the engineers of the new computer technology”—a group he refers to as the “new Mandarins.”1

Chomsky largely launders this claim through quotation and attribution, rarely stating the thesis in his own declarative voice. Nevertheless, the position is unmistakably his. Later in the same discussion he poses the explicitly normative question: “Quite generally, what grounds are there for supposing that those whose claim to power is based on knowledge and technique will be more benign in their exercise of power than those whose claim is based on wealth or aristocratic origin?”2 The question only makes sense if Chomsky accepts the premise he dances around instead of stating directly —that technocratic expertise has become a central basis of political power in the United States. This shift, however, represents not a displacement of capitalist power, but a reorganization of its managerial apparatus.

The rest of the book is filled with hand-wringing and finger-waving about how American schools and universities are not independent centers of free inquiry, but function instead as the long arm of the state. Their primary role, in Chomsky’s account, is to train the technocratic elite—the experts and intellectuals who supply the ideological cover for American imperialism abroad and domestic repression at home.

He concludes the analysis of intellectuals with his signature essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” where he finally states the moral core of his argument without laundering it through quotation. Intellectuals, Chomsky argues, constitute a privileged minority uniquely positioned to uncover truth precisely because of their structural advantages. As he writes, “Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions”3 and these intellectuals possess “the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology, and class interest through which the events of current history are presented” and it is their responsibility to “speak the truth and expose the lies.4”

The framework Chomsky advances as the “responsibility of intellectuals” rests on a configuration of assumptions about intellectual agency in a capitalist, bourgeois-led society. The very privileges that grant intellectuals leisure, institutional access, and training also align their class interests with capitalist hegemony, rendering them among the least likely actors to challenge its foundational premises. Ironically, Chomsky spent nearly 300 pages detailing how intellectuals repeat the government line, accept without question the legitimacy of imperial state interests, and rationalize violence within the language of expertise. If it were simply a moral failure, then one can shame these intellectuals to “tell the truth” through polemical exposition. But the consistency with which they reproduce elite premises—documented throughout Chomsky’s own account—indicates that this behavior is not aberrational, but constitutive of their institutional role within an imperial system.

While Chomsky meticulously maps the mechanism of deceit employed by the New Mandarins, he stops short of analyzing the structural necessity of that deceit. He treats the betrayal of the intellectuals as a moral failure of the ‘priesthood,’ believing that exposing their hypocrisy will shatter their power.

However, a materialist analysis reveals that these intellectuals are not merely failing their moral duties; they are successfully fulfilling their institutional functions. By focusing on the lies of the experts rather than the class interests that demand those lies, Chomsky preserves a liberal faith in the power of truth to constrain empire—ignoring that the empire is sustained not by the credibility of its Mandarins, but by the material force of its economic base.

What American Power and the New Mandarins ultimately reveals is not the failure of intellectuals to live up to their moral responsibilities, but the limits of moral critique itself when detached from class analysis. Chomsky meticulously documents how intellectuals rationalize imperial violence and translate domination into the neutral language of expertise. Yet, by framing this as a problem of vigilance and courage, he preserves the liberal hope that truth-telling by privileged actors can constrain power.

The evidence he assembles points to a different conclusion: intellectuals do not merely fail to oppose imperial power—they are selected, trained, and positioned to reproduce it. Exposure, under these conditions, does not threaten domination; it stabilizes it. The problem is not that intellectuals have failed to tell the truth, but that the social role of the intellectual is inseparable from the reproduction of the system that defines which truths matter in the first place.

These theoretical contradictions manifest concretely in Chomsky’s Vietnam analysis. When engaging with the text, Chomsky’s disciplinary respectability politics produces dense prose that obscures his analysis.

One stark example appears in the chapter “The Logic of Withdrawal,” where Noam Chomsky introduces the term pacification in the context of the U.S. military’s assumption of that role. He notes that Senator Young reacts to reports that South Vietnamese forces are unwilling to perform what amounts to police work, requiring so-called “pacification” to be taken over by the American army. Chomsky then quotes the senator at length: “If the South Vietnamese forces of Prime Minister Ky are so inadequate in numbers, intelligence, and training that they cannot handle entirely the pacification program in the villages … then instead of Americans trying to train, indoctrinate, and pacify an alien people, the time is long past due for us to withdraw to our coastal bases and eventually from Vietnam.”5

While Chomsky does document the devastation of rural villages resulting from American policy, he never clearly conveys to the reader what pacification actually meant in practice. The term functions as a military euphemism that sanitizes the scale and character of the violence involved. Had he instead juxtaposed this language with Nguyễn Cao Kỳ’s own words—who stated in a 1965 interview that “the situation here [Vietnam] is so desperate now that one man would not be enough. We need four or five Hitlers in Vietnam”—the meaning of U.S. policy would have been unmistakable. Under this framing, pacification is revealed not as stabilization or policing, but as the application of overwhelming, systematic violence against a civilian population.

In other words, by pacification, the United States was providing the role of the “four or five Hitlers.” It was unleashing genocidal violence against rural populations—destroying villages, killing civilians, and breaking the material basis of life itself. If the South Vietnamese regime could not survive without this level of violence against its own population, that fact alone exposes pacification not as policing or stabilization, but as mass destruction used to sustain an otherwise untenable political order.

While Chomsky accurately describes why the United States continues to support the South Vietnamese government—“Nor is it obscure why the American government continues to use its military force to impose on the people of Vietnam the regime of the most corrupt, most reactionary elements in Vietnamese society. There is simply no one else who will do its bidding”—he then imputes an inaccurate picture of Vietnamese society by claiming that this regime must resist “the overwhelming popular sentiment for peace and, no doubt, neutralism”6

This characterization reflects categories that resonate within American liberal discourse, but it does not accurately describe the political reality of South Vietnam. Among an overwhelmingly peasant population—especially in the Mekong Delta—peace without liberation was understood as surrender, and neutrality as the preservation of an intolerable social order. The mass demand was not for peace or non-alignment, but for a revolutionary government capable of delivering land, material survival, and national independence, even at the cost of prolonged and intensified war.

By translating a revolutionary demands of “liberation and redistribution” to “peace and neutrality” into liberal categories acceptable to American discourse, Chomsky obscures the central contradiction: pacification was not an effort to manage dissent or restore order, but the organized application of massive violence required to impose a landlord state on a population seeking revolutionary transformation.

This distortion is underscored on the very next page, where Chomsky quotes a Vietnamese doctor stating:

The Americans have demolished everything. All that we have built since 1954 is in ruins: hospitals, schools, factories, new dwellings. We have nothing more to lose, except for independence and liberty. But to safeguard these, believe me, we are ready to endure anything.

This testimony directly undermines the claim that the dominant popular sentiment was peace or neutralism; it expresses a willingness to endure unlimited suffering in pursuit of liberation.

Chomsky’s own anti-communist impulse prevents him from foregrounding this contradiction. To accept that the Vietnamese population was fighting with extraordinary determination to impose a Marxist-Leninist political order would require conceding that Marxism-Leninism functioned, in this context, as a genuinely liberatory framework capable of delivering concrete material benefits to the population—an implication Chomsky has consistently resisted throughout his work.

Another familiar pattern that Chomsky repeats many times in US policy analysis is the reliance on legalese or condemning the US for violations of international law. He says, “The disregard for law and treaty was illustrated strikingly by our behavior with respect to the Geneva agreements of 1954.7” But, by his own admission, US never signed the Geneva accord, therefore, they cannot be bound by a law or treaty they never signed. If he wanted to show blatant violations of international law, there were much more striking examples, such as the strategic Hamlet program reported in 1962, where entire villages were forcibly relocated into these strategic hamlets, that the New York Time sanitized as “ The greatest advance in the hamlets has been psychological, he said, for the erection of barbed wire and bamboo fences has given a sense of unity and identity” instead of “imprisoning the people.8”

By July 1967, any subscriber to The New Yorker (arguably the most “respectable” magazine in America) could read Jonathan Schell’s detailed account of how the US military was erasing the distinction between civilian and combatant. Chomsky didn’t need secret cables; he just needed to read the issue of The New Yorker that was likely sitting on every coffee table in the MIT faculty lounge. But instead, he contorts himself before coming to the conclusion, “Thus our aim was to violate our commitment at Geneva. This aim was part of our general program of “trying to safeguard South Vietnam as part of the ‘retainment’ of all or most of non-communist Asia.9”

While the conclusion is true, it misses the heart of the problem. South Vietnam was a colonial entity imposed by the US to prevent the exercise of Vietnamese Democracy. By retreating into “twisted legalese” about a treaty the US never signed, Chomsky inadvertently accepted the US framing of the conflict—that it was a diplomatic dispute gone wrong, rather than a colonial extermination campaign.

This legal framing error does not remain confined to questions of treaties or formal obligations. It directly shapes how Chomsky treats the question of Vietnamese resistance itself. He accepts the American framing, and then continues to argue about how the North Vietnamese did not commit aggression. By arguing that the North Vietnamese did not commit aggression, Chomsky falls into the trap of implying that if they had, the US response would have been justified. By even justifying the US reasoning, Chomsky doesn’t beat the war mongers in their own game, instead, he allows their reasoning to be smuggled into the minds of the reader. The stronger anti-imperial position would be: regardless of who attacked first, the Vietnamese have every right to expel a colonizing force and its collaborationist government.

But the most outrageous, is the falsehood that Chomsky promotes, where he claims, “It is curious, incidentally, that today only the United States and the “Communists” insist that South Vietnam is a separate and independent entity10” which is entirely false. Since the NLF’s Party Program calls the South Vietnamese government, “is a camouflaged colonial regime dominated by the Yankees, and the South Vietnamese government is a servile government, implementing faithfully all the policies of the American imperialism.”11

Even in his attempt to defend the People’s Liberation army, he uses the constitution of the Saigon regime,

The Saigon authorities maintain, in article 1 of the new constitution, that "Vietnam [not SouthVietnam] is a territorially indivisible, unified, and independent republic," of which they claim to be the rulers ; article 107 of the constitution specifies that article 1 cannot be amended.

By using their constitution, Chomsky validates their existence as a government with laws worth taking seriously. Finally, even in his defense of Ho Chi Minh, he uses criminalizing language of “aggression” (or invading a foreign country) or Insurrection (also a crime). Instead of the more accurate conclusion, Ho Chi Minh’s government was a legitimate government who was expelling a foreign invader. The legalistic defense accepts the premise that the puppet regime has a right to exist and be subverted.

What unites these analytical failures—the euphemism of “pacification,” the mistranslation of revolutionary demands as “peace and neutralism,” the legalistic contortions over unsigned treaties—is a more fundamental evasion: Throughout American Power and the New Mandarins, while Chomsky documents US atrocities and colonial war, he never acknowledges the Vietnamese People’s Liberation Army and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as the legitimate government of Vietnam.

This is not a minor omission. It is the core contradiction that undermines his entire analysis.

Chomsky can document that the South Vietnamese regime is “the most corrupt, most reactionary elements in Vietnamese society” sustained only by US military force. He can show that the overwhelming majority supports the NLF. He can quote Vietnamese people declaring their willingness to “endure anything” for independence and liberty. He can expose “pacification” as mass violence against civilians.

Yet even while proving all this, he still frames the conflict through imperial categories: “South Vietnam” exists as a legitimate entity, the NLF and DRV coordination is suspect and requires apologetic defense, Ho Chi Minh sending troops south would be “aggression” rather than a government acting within its own territory. He uses the Saigon regime’s constitution as if it were a meaningful legal document rather than puppet theater.

He can document that the US is waging colonial war against the Vietnamese people, but he cannot state that the Vietnamese communist forces fighting that war represent the legitimate government of a unified Vietnam.

This explains every other evasion in the text. Why translate “liberation and land redistribution” into “peace and neutralism”? Because acknowledging revolutionary demands would mean accepting that the communists offered something the US puppet could never provide. Why retreat into legal technicalities about Geneva? Because stating clearly that Vietnam was one country under foreign occupation would expose “South Vietnam” as the fiction it was. Why apologize that the NLF doesn’t “really” coordinate with Hanoi? Because Vietnamese unity against imperialism undermines the premise that there are “two Vietnams.”

The Vietnamese understood what Chomsky’s framework obscures: they were not insurgents or rebels fighting against legitimate authority. They were the legitimate government and the people it represented, expelling foreign occupiers and their collaborationist puppets. The NLF and DRV were not “coordinating aggression” across an invented border—they were one nation fighting a unified liberation war. The demand was not for “peace” or “neutrality” but for what any sovereign people have the right to demand: control of their land, their resources, their political destiny.

Chomsky can expose US lies and document atrocities, but he cannot make the simple statement that follows logically from his own evidence: The Democratic Republic of Vietnam, led by Ho Chi Minh, was the legitimate government of Vietnam. The National Liberation Front represented the will of the South Vietnamese people. The Saigon regime was a US-imposed puppet with no legitimate authority. The Vietnamese communists had every right to expel the foreign invaders by any means necessary.

This is not radical rhetoric—it is the straightforward conclusion from the facts Chomsky himself presents. His refusal to state it clearly reveals the fundamental limitation of his anti-imperialism: he can oppose imperial violence but cannot affirm the legitimacy of those fighting against it. He can document colonial war but not name the colonized as the rightful victors. He can expose the puppet but not crown the revolution.

Finally, after the exposition of all the atrocities in Vietnam, Chomsky’s only prescription in his essay “On Resistance” is peaceful draft resistance, which as the critic William X explains, “only volunteers people for prison”. Ironically, the biggest contradiction in his prescription is that he states, “The argument that resistance to the war should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming. As a tactic, violence is absurd. No one can compete with the government in this arena” when he literally demonstrated in the past 373 pages that the Vietnamese peasants were successfully doing just that.

The contradiction reveals everything: he can analyze revolutionary victory when it’s safely in the past, but he cannot affirm it as legitimate. He can document peasant resistance, but not acknowledge it as the exercise of rightful authority by a government defending its people against foreign invasion.

Without this clarity, anti-imperialism becomes a performance of moral anguish rather than solidarity with liberation. Readers can feel outraged about hypocrisy, appreciate sophisticated legal arguments, admire resistance from a safe distance—all while the basic question of who has the right to rule Vietnam remains obscured in euphemism and evasion.

The Vietnamese won not by exposing American hypocrisy or arguing about international law, but by organizing as the legitimate representatives of their people and fighting until the invaders left. They did not need Chomsky to validate their government’s legitimacy—they established it through revolutionary transformation of material conditions, mass popular support, and successful military resistance.

What Chomsky’s Vietnam writing ultimately reveals is that you cannot build effective anti-imperialism while accepting imperial categories about legitimacy, sovereignty, and rightful authority. You cannot oppose colonial war while treating the colonizer’s puppet as a government worth taking seriously. You cannot document popular support for revolutionaries while framing them as insurgents rather than the legitimate expression of popular will.

The tragedy is that this evasion is not unique to Vietnam. As we will see in examining Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, Chomsky’s pattern of accepting imperial enemy construction while opposing imperial methods persists and degrades—becoming less rigorous, more accepting of propaganda, until the author of Manufacturing Consent falls victim to the very consent he claimed to expose.

More troubling is the fact that Chomsky authored a letter of recommendation on Epstein’s behalf, a detail that gives Manufacturing Consent an unintentional new resonance. Chomsky also sought Epstein’s assistance with what he described as a “difficult transaction” related to his late wife’s estate — a request that culminated in Epstein transferring $270,000 into Chomsky’s bank account.

Ordinarily, when a previously admired public intellectual is revealed to have engaged in conduct this compromised, supporters reassess. Unfortunately, rather than reassessing their position, Chomsky’s defenders have opted to maintain their necessary illusions. The most striking example is a recent article in The Nation by Yale professor Greg Grandin, which reads less like analysis than public relations.

The defenses offered fall into a few predictable categories:

1. “Chomsky writes letters for everyone.”

   If Chomsky truly “writes to everyone,” the obvious step would have been for defenders to ask him directly. They did not.

   Even if true, this does not justify corresponding with — let alone recommending — a convicted sex offender with documented ties to political elites across party lines.

2. “Chomsky didn’t know Epstein was a convicted pedophile.”

   This claim is implausible. Epstein’s 2006 investigation and 2008 guilty plea were widely reported. His status as a registered sex offender was a matter of public record. Chomsky, who prides himself on documentary rigor, had access to Google.

3. “Epstein initiated the contact.”8

   Irrelevant. Chomsky sustained the relationship, including being on a flight with him.

4. “The 2018 exposé was the first major reporting on Epstein.”

   This is simply false.

5. “We don’t know that Chomsky wrote the recommendation letter.”

Despite this, many continue defending Chomsky on the grounds that he is “good for the left” — as if moral compromise becomes acceptable when attached to the correct political brand.

For those who are instead asking, What went wrong? or Where did Chomsky go wrong? this article is for you. The answer is uncomfortable but simple: nothing went wrong. Chomsky did not change. You did. You grew.

Chomsky was always like this.

If I were to describe Noam Chomsky in one sentence, I would describe him as “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”, a famous example of a sentence that is perfectly grammatical but entirely meaningless, which Chomsky coined in his Book Syntactic Structures. This sentence perfectly describes Chomsky’s entire career, as he has perfected the art of saying perfectly grammatical sentences that are entirely meaningless.

Consider, for example:

“Lenin was a right-wing deviation of the socialist movement. And he was so regarded by the mainstream Marxists… We’ve forgotten who the mainstream Marxists were because they lost.”1

Or:

“Fairly deep properties of the number system… may well be genetically determined… arising as a concomitant of structural properties of the brain developed for other reasons.”2

Both of these show that while Chomsky was able to use them in a grammatically correct fashion, without understanding the deep meaning. The Epstein revelations did not represent a fall from grace, but instead, it merely a continuation of his often jumbled and incoherent thought in both linguistics and in his politics.

There is no need to defend Chomsky.

And there is no reason to mourn him.

He is not a visionary, nor is a revolutionary.

While his supporters credit him with opening their eyes, seeing the world through Chomsky’s framework ultimately narrows the field of vision in linguistics and encourages a defeatist politics

The Epstein correspondence is not a betrayal of Chomsky’s principles, but their logical conclusion. The problem that unites his linguistics and his politics is not error, but a foundational refusal to engage with the real world on any terms but his own idealized abstractions.

In linguistics, this meant defining his object of study—language—out of existence. He famously began by excluding the very thing that makes language real: communication.

“Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.3

He didn’t study language as it is spoken; he invented a purified mathematical object—a syntax machine—untouched by society, history, or human imperfection.

In politics, he performed the same maneuver. He overtly rejected the messy, material analysis of power. When asked about dialectical materialism—a method for analyzing historical contradiction and change—he dismissed it:

Question: “Dialectics?”

Chomsky: “Dialectics is one that I’ve never understood, actually—I’ve just never understood what the word means. Marx doesn’t use it, incidentally, it’s used by Engels. And if anybody can tell me what it is, I’ll be happy. I mean, I’ve read all kinds of things which talk about ‘dialectics’—I haven’t the foggiest idea what it is. It seems to mean something about complexity, or alternative positions, or change, or something. I don’t know.”4

This is not humility; it is a declaration of method. He refuses the tools that examine how power concretely operates through institutions and economies, preferring instead to judge the world against an abstract, moralistic idealism. The result is a politics of incoherence, ignorance and irrelevance. In Chomsky’s own words, “a colorless green idea”

Therefore, to understand the man who could write a recommendation for Jeffrey Epstein, we must first understand the thinker. We must trace how the same intellectual habit—the retreat from the contaminated real into a self-referential ideal—produced both the elegant emptiness of his syntax and the morally bankrupt equivalences of his politics. The flight from material reality in his theory made the flight on Epstein’s plane, and the subsequent defenses of it, not just possible, but consistent.

Part 1: Chomsky’s Linguistic Theories of Nothing

Part 2: The Acceptable Dissident

Part 3: Chomsky: The Moderate Rebel

Chomsky’s claim to fame in his primary field of linguistics came from his 1957 publication Syntactic Structures, a monograph extracted from his dissertation. The main proposal was for an all encompassing linguistic theory, whereby Chomsky defines language as:

All natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense, since each natural language has a finite number of phonemes (or letters in its alphabet), and each sentence is representable as a finite sequence of these phonemes (or letters), though there are infinitely many sentences.1

The main contribution of Syntactic Structures is the proposal to study syntax as an autonomous formal system, separate from meaning. Chomsky introduces the idea of a generative grammar, defined as a finite set of rules capable of generating all grammatical sentences of a language while excluding ungrammatical ones. At the time, linguistic analysis relied heavily on phrase structure rules, such as representing a sentence as a noun phrase plus a verb phrase. Chomsky accepts these rules as a starting point but argues that they are insufficient on their own. He proposed transformations that derive non-kernel sentences from a basic set of kernel sentences, capturing systematic relationships among sentence forms without redundancy. The most controversial aspect of this approach is the claim that syntactic well-formedness cannot be reduced to semantic meaningfulness, illustrated by the famous sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” which is grammatically well formed despite being semantically anomalous.

This methodological separation of syntax from meaning generated controversy within the broader social sciences, as it deliberately abstracted away from the historical, social, and political dimensions of language. In Syntactic Structures, a language is defined purely as a formal set of sentences generated by a grammar, and communication between speakers is not part of the definition. These factors are bracketed in order to focus exclusively on the formal properties of syntactic structure

Chomsky’s next book, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), systematized and extended the framework sketched in Syntactic Structures by proposing a fully articulated theoretical architecture for linguistic competence, later known as Standard Theory. As we mentioned earlier, he abstracts away any actual speakers as “performance” and instead focuses on the competence of an “ideal speaker-listener.” In fact, the actual question he attempted to answer was, how a child could learn a language despite having listened to “imperfect speakers” or actual people. He states:

To learn a language, then, the child must have a method for devising an appropriate grammar, given primary linguistic data. As a precondition for language learning, he must possess, first, a linguistic theory that specifies the form of the grammar of a possible human language, and, second, a strategy for selecting a grammar of the appropriate form that is compatible with the primary linguistic data2

The details are tedious, but the principle is clear: language is formalized as a nested hierarchy of representations, in which meaning is fixed early and progressively insulated from use. As Chomsky puts it, “the syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.”3 Meaning, once assigned, is no longer negotiated in discourse but carried through successive layers of structural manipulation.

For those who want to give a charitable reading to Chomsky, and claim that he is proposing a model for machine that take human speech as input are wrong.. In Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Chomsky, he explicitly frames linguistic theory as a theory of mental competence, describing the internalized knowledge that an ideal speaker-hearer possesses, rather than an account of performance, behavior, or engineering systems4

The biological community rightfully criticized Chomsky for not incorporating any data on actual language acquisition, the anthropological community criticized him for ignoring the cultural aspect of language as a group activity, where communication is primary. The one field that met Chomsky’s proposal enthusiastically was the computer science community, who thought it could be useful for creating a computational linguistic machine.

However, two mathematicians R. Stanley Peters and Robert Ritchie dashed his hopes when in 1973, they proved Standard theory to be Turing-complete.5meaning it could generate any recursively enumerable set, not just human languages. The theory had become so powerful it could no longer distinguish between actual human language and arbitrary strings of symbols. A linguistic theory that can generate anything at all is scientifically useless: it makes no falsifiable predictions about what counts as a possible human language versus what doesn't. As one sharp-tongued critic put it, Chomsky's model was about as useful as "a biological theory which failed to characterize the difference between raccoons and light bulbs."6 If your theory of biology can't tell living organisms from inanimate objects, it's not a theory of biology—and if your theory of language can't distinguish language from non-language, it's not a theory of language. Consequently, computer scientists abandoned the formalism entirely and turned to statistical methods for natural language processing.

Despite these evidentiary setbacks, Chomsky never abandoned his initial assumptions about language. He instead came out with yet another theory known as Government and Binding in 1981 and most importantly in the 1980s, he posited an idea of Universal Grammar (UG) that answered questions based on a set of flawed assumptions that do not conform to actual data:

(1) Degenerate,Meagre, and Minute Language Input, (2) Impoverished Stimulus Input, (3) Ease and Speed of Child Language Acquisition, and (4) The Irrelevance of Intelligence in Language Learning.

He defined UG as a

Universal Grammar is defined as the core grammar containing the principles and parameters which apply to all languages. The other aspects of th e grammar of any particular language are referred to as ‘peripheral grammar’ and a ‘mentallexicon’. These must be learned separately from UG because the peripheral grammar and the lexicon are not universal but are specific to particular languages7

Furthermore, Chomsky makes a distinction between E-language (external language and communication that we use in our speech) and I-language (internal language for cognition). He posits that UG is meant to explain only I-language, once again echoing his “competence vs performance” split from earlier. In fact, an anything that is uncomfortable or disproves his theory can always be moved to the category of e-language.

His UG theory was shown not to conform with any empirical data, as all the initial assumptions were proven false. The inputs are not degenerate. There is no impoverished stimulus, children take 4-5 years to learn languages and intelligence is not a well defined biological category. (See Psycholinguistics for an entire Chapter Debunking UG)

As UG became more and more cumbersome, Chomsky decided, once again to change his theory called the “minimalist program” in 1995. He stripped away much of the elaborate technical machinery—the complex transformational rules, the Government and Binding parameters—but retained all the core assumptions: language is innate, biologically specified, autonomous from meaning and social context, and governed by Universal Grammar.

What changed was the claim about what Universal Grammar actually is. After decades of failed predictions, Chomsky reduced it to a single essential property: recursion—the ability to embed structures within structures infinitely, like in the children’s song “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly”: she swallowed a spider to catch the fly, then a bird to catch the spider (that wiggled and jiggled inside her to catch the fly), then a cat to catch the bird (to catch the spider to catch the fly)—each verse embedding all the previous ones.

This, he now claimed, was the defining feature separating human language from all other communication systems. Everything else could vary, but recursion was the irreducible universal core.

But when linguists actually examined languages across the world, they found counterexamples. Pirahã, an Amazonian language documented extensively by Daniel Everett, appears to function perfectly well without Chomskyan recursion. The language has no embedding, no relative clauses, no recursive structures of the type Chomsky claimed were universal—yet its speakers communicate complex ideas successfully.

Chomsky's linguistic theories, from Universal Grammar to the Minimalist Program, are founded on a decisive—and fatal—move: they define their object of study as an internal computational system, explicitly excluding its communicative function. By relegating social use, meaning negotiation, and pragmatic context to the periphery of 'performance,' the theory renders itself irrelevant to explaining why language exists, how it is learned in interactive contexts, and how it shapes and is shaped by society. It is a meticulous blueprint for a machine that is never plugged in, a formalist fantasy that, by its own design, cannot engage with the core reality of language as a tool for human connection and control. In excluding communication, it excludes everything that makes language, a system of communication.

In other words, his theory of languages are “colorless green ideas” or entirely nonsensical sentences that have no bearing to language acquisition to human or machine learning.

For Chomsky, the only scientifically legitimate object of study is the internal, individual cognitive system—the I-language generated by the biological blueprint of UG. Everything else, particularly the messy external collectivities we call 'English' or 'French,' is derivative and 'obscure.' This intellectual move is not merely technical; it is profoundly ideological. It establishes a foundational principle that he will apply relentlessly in his political work: that true understanding comes from analyzing the inherent capacities and rights of the individual (the 'I-state'), while dismissing larger collective structures—be they languages, states, or historical traditions—as arbitrary, obscure, and ultimately illegitimate constraints on human freedom. In essence, his linguistics provides the epistemological blueprint for his anarchism.

Part 2: The Acceptable Dissident

While Chomsky’s political persona is that of an outsider, his intellectual career was built on the support of the very power structures, he claimed to denounce.

His revolutionary 1957 work, Syntactic Structures, which alienated social scientists by abstracting language from history and society, proved highly attractive to the U.S. military establishment. The emerging field of command-and-control computing saw in generative grammar the promise of a formal model of language that could be implemented computationally—a bridge between human orders and machine execution. As the preface to the first edition coldly acknowledges, the research was funded in part by the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, the National Science Foundation, and the Eastman Kodak Corporation

The military’s interest was not academic. Colonel Edmund P. Gaines of the Air Force articulated a blunt rationale:

“The Air Force has an increasingly large investment in so called ‘command and control’ computer systems… Command and control systems would be easier to use, and it would be easier to train people to use them, if [the] translation [from English] were not necessary. We sponsored linguistic research in order to learn how to build command and control systems that could understand English queries directly.”1

The appeal was precisely in Chomsky’s decontextualized, rule-based model of language. By defining language as a formal system of symbols separable from meaning, use, and social reality, Syntactic Structures offered a blueprint for the military’s “holy grail”: a computational system to understand and, by implication, more efficiently execute commands for operations like the defense of the continental United States or, as Gaines noted, “our forces in Vietnam.”

When asked about the nature of his work and US department of defense funding in 1971, contorted his logic by invoking Karl Marx:

Now as to how I tolerate MIT, that raises another question. There are no people who argue, and I have never understood the logic of this, that a radical ought to dissociate himself from oppressive institutions. The logic of that argument is that Karl Marx shouldn’t have studied in the British Museum which, if anything, was the symbol of the most vicious imperialism in the world, the place where all the treasures an empire had gathered from the rape of the colonies, were brought together. But I think Karl Marx was quite right in studying in the British Museum. He was right in using the resources and in fact the liberal values of the civilisation that he was trying to overcome, against it. And I think the same applies in this case.

Of course, there is a huge difference between using a reading room of a public building and being a tenured faculty at an institute that directly did military research such as developing more advanced weapons systems to further US military aims.

Chomsky defending the DOD funding in a 2016 interview, he stated,

‘That’s actually a widespread illusion. … It’s very widely believed but basically the military didn’t care what you were doing. In our our project at MIT for example, one of the main works were on American Indian language. The military didn’t care. What the military was doing was serving a kind of a funnel by which tax-payer money was being used to create the hi-tech economy of the future

But even this example is misleading. American Indian languages did have military applications—the Navajo code-talkers being the most famous example. More importantly, his theory promised a universal translator for military communications, even though it ultimately proved useless for computational linguistics. The pattern reveals something larger about Chomsky: a willingness to minimize his own proximity to power.

But one cannot wonder the very important question: During the cold war, academics, even in hard sciences were purged for having any marginally leftist views, he was kept on, not only tolerated but celebrated.

There are other instances when Chomsky defended figures at the heart of U.S. empire. Walt Rostow—an economist who wrote The Stages of Economic Development: A Non-Communist Manifesto, calling communism a “disease of transition” requiring U.S. military intervention to resist—served as Johnson’s national security advisor from 1966, continuously advocating for more hawkish, cruel, and extensive engagement by the U.S. military in Vietnam.

When Richard Nixon won the Presidency, Rostow was no longer needed, and MIT initially contemplated offering Rostow his old job back. Student protests made them reluctant. Yet Chomsky’s position was

In fact, as a spokesman for the Rosa Luxemburg collective, I went to see the President of MIT in 1969 to inform him that we intended to protest publicly if there turned out to be any truth to the rumors then circulating that Walt Rostow (who we regarded as a war criminal) was being denied a position at MIT on political group.2

While protests against Rostow led MIT to decide not to offer him a position, this was not the only powerful person with reprehensible politics that Chomsky supported. There is the story of John Deutch, who headed two Pentagon panels on Intercontinental ballistic missiles alongside figures like Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld. While serving in the Reagan administration, John Deutch advised MIT to apply for an army contract for mycotoxin research—in other words, biological weapons. In 1988, he was offered a position as Provost at MIT, which was met with outrage among students and faculty3. But Chomsky recounted in his 1996 book:

We were actually friends and got along fine, although we disagreed on about as many things as two human beings can disagree about. I liked him. We got along very well together. He’s very honest, very direct. You know where you stand with him. We talked to each other. When we had disagreements, they were open, sharp, clear, honestly dealt with. I found it fine. I had no problem with him. I was one of the very few people on the faculty, I’m told, who was supporting his candidacy for the President of MIT.4

Later in 1995, when the Clinton administration wanted to appoint Deutch as the head of the CIA, he was met with Chomsky’s endorsement:

[Deutch] has more honesty and integrity than anyone I’ve ever met in academic life, or any other life. If somebody’s got to be running the CIA, I’m glad it’s him.

Apparently, integrity means supporting research into biological weapons in Noam Chomsky’s world. These friendships put his letter of recommendation for Epstein into perspective. It is not an error in judgment. It is the latest installment in a long-standing practice of maintaining cordial relations with figures at the heart of U.S. military and intelligence power, while maintaining the public image of being a “dissident” critic of US foreign policy.

As his linguistic theories proved useless for any actual linguistic applications, perhaps Chomsky’s value lies in his position as the “acceptable dissident”—one who echoes Rostow’s anticommunist position while misinforming a vast number of people about U.S. enemy states. Applying the propaganda model to Chomsky himself, he functions as a gatekeeper who leads well-intentioned activists into ineffective tactics and analysis that pose no threat to American power.

Part 3: Chomsky: The Moderate Rebel

Summary:

This is perhaps the single-most common dismissal used by capitalists against socialist governments. This is repeated ubiquitously against across all capitalist and conservative sources as an Axiom. This aphorism appears in countless forms but rarely with specific attribution - it’s treated as received wisdom that needs no justification. The argument implies that:

1. The theory is internally consistent and appealing,

2. BUT human nature or practical realities make it impossible,

3. Every attempt has failed, proving it can’t work,

4. Advocates are naive idealists ignoring reality.

Variants:

• “Real communism has never been tried” (mockery of defenders)

• “It’s utopian thinking”

• “Sounds good, doesn’t work”

• “Nice idea, wrong species”

• “Human nature makes it impossible”

• “You can’t change human nature”

The rhetorical function allows the person making the argument seem reasonable (”I understand the appeal...”) while dismissing the actual counterpoint entirely. Positions capitalism as “realistic” and “practical” vs. socialism as “idealistic” and “theoretical.” It frames issue as settled empirical fact rather than debatable question and it functions as a thought-stopping cliché that ends discussion before it begins.

Sources:

• Pervasive across Cato Institute, Mises Institute, TPUSA, PragerU materials

• Repeated by Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and other prominent conservatives

• Standard conservative talking point found in political discourse, social media, and casual conversation

• Hoover Institution: “The False Appeal of Socialism” (2020)

• Frequently cited without attribution as “common knowledge”

The genius (and weakness) of this argument is that it’s designed to be unattributable - it masquerades as universal wisdom rather than ideological propaganda.

Rebuttal

CAPITALISM DOESN’T EVEN WORK IN THEORY!

This argument is designed to masquerade as universal wisdom instead of an ideological propaganda. “It’s repeated everywhere precisely because it’s a thought-stopping cliché, not an actual analysis.” Everyone who makes this argument always advocate for another system: Capitalism.

It is meant to paint defenders of socialism and communism as idealists living in a utopian society while defenders of capitalism are painted as “realists” who understand the inner workings of the real world. However, nothing can be further from the truth.

While these anti-communists do concede to the fact that communism works in theory, they seem to forget that capitalism, doesn’t even work in theory, let alone in practice.

Why Capitalism Fails in Theory:

Contrary to popular belief, capitalism isn’t when people sell “things” or commodities, which is basically a thing of value that can be traded. Traditionally, people used money to buy commodities such as sugar or rice, and the majority would then consume most of it. However, around the 1600s something changed:industrialization. Commodities that were locally produced and sold, were now produced on a mass scale and sold non-locally in mass quantities. People who were already wealthy were able to use their money in order to trade for commodities in large quantities, not to use or acquire these commodities, but to resell it in order to acquire surplus value. Marx labeled this process the M-C-M’ cycle:

For example, if someone invests €100,000 to buy five cars and register them for ride-sharing services like Uber, the cars are not purchased for personal transportation, rather they are bought as capital. Drivers are hired to operated them. The cars are kept on the roads as much as possible. After a year, the entrepreneur has earned €160,000 in fares and commissions. This is the classic M–C–M′ cycle in modern form:

M (Money): €100,000 capital outlay

C (Commodity): Cars, app registrations, and labor time

M′ (More Money): €160,000 — the original sum plus surplus value extracted through the drivers’ work

The point isn’t that society gains more mobility — the cars’ use-value — but that money has returned to its owner augmented. The drivers’ labor and the vehicles’ wear are just the intermediaries through which money begets more money.

In Marx’s analysis, this raised a crucial question: where does that “more money” actually come from? It cannot come from the mere act of exchange, since every trade in a market swaps equivalents — €1,000 worth of goods for €1,000 in cash. The capitalist doesn’t create new value by buying and selling alone. To find the source of profit, Marx followed the chain backward and found it in the one place where something new is produced: the worker’s labor. The capitalist purchases labor power for less than the value it creates. The difference between what the worker is paid and the value their labor adds to the final product is the surplus value — and this, Marx argued, is where exploitation truly begins.

Which begets the first contradiction of capitalism: there’s only so much you can squeeze workers’ wages before the system begins to undermine itself. The more labor is exploited to maximize profit, the fewer people there are with the purchasing power to buy what capitalism produces. In other words, by impoverishing its own consumers, capital saws off the very branch it sits on. This creates a crisis of underconsumption. Capitalism ends up undermining its own market base.

The second way capitalism fails theoretically is that if there are multiple firms that produce the same commodity, each firm must expand their output to flush the competition out of business. But, when all the firms end up doing that simultaneously, the market becomes saturated and the price of the goods drop exponentially. This leads to periodic cycles of bankruptcies, layoffs and and boom and bust cycles. Many of which, we have witnessed in our lifetimes (depending on our age).

During these recurring crises, weaker firms collapse while stronger ones buy up their competitors. This process leads to the consolidation of ownership — both horizontally, when companies absorb rivals within the same industry, and vertically, when they expand control up and down the supply chain. Over time, this turns competitive markets into a handful of monopolies and cartels, exactly as Lenin described in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. What begins as a system of competition ends as a hierarchy of concentrated power.

As Lenin demonstrated in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, by 1907 just 0.9% of German enterprises controlled over half of all industrial workers and the majority of total output. What Marx had theorized as the concentration of capital had already become measurable reality.

Unfortunately, the contradictions and pitfalls don’t end there. As a handful of cartels and monopolies dominate production, their need for profit and raw materials grows insatiable. To keep their factories running and capital expanding, they must look beyond their own borders. Hence begins the drive to colonize the world — to seize new territories, control resources, and secure cheap labor. To keep their factories running and profits rising, they expand outward — colonizing the world. Colonialism reconfigured entire societies for extraction: in India, the British East India Company replaced food crops with tea, opium, and indigo; in Cuba, only sugar could be grown; in Rwanda, fertile farmland was seized for industrial coffee under German and Belgian rule. The result was the same everywhere — famine, dependence, and the destruction of local industry. Colonies that had once fed themselves were forced to import basic food from the imperial core, enriching the same corporations that had robbed them.

As Lenin explained in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, German enterprises entered the colonial race late. By the early 20th century, Britain and France had already divided most of the globe into their own spheres of exploitation. To secure access to raw materials and markets essential for its survival, German capital had only one option left — to seize colonies by force. Thus, imperial rivalry transformed into military conflict, culminating in the First World War: a struggle not of nations, but of capitalist powers fighting over a world that had already been divided.

Capitalism Fails in Practice

When the First World War ended, the map of empire changed, but its logic remained. The victors didn’t simply punish Germany for aggression — they neutralized an economic competitor. The Treaty of Versailles makes perfect sense when viewed through the lens of capitalist rivalry, not morality. France and Britain sought to permanently weaken Germany’s industrial base, which by 1914 had already surpassed both in steel production, chemical research, and machine manufacturing.

By stripping Germany of its colonies, restricting its military, seizing patents, and imposing astronomical reparations, the Allies ensured that German capital could not re-enter global markets as an equal competitor. Versailles wasn’t about peace; it was about market control. It froze the world’s hierarchy of production — guaranteeing that France and Britain would continue extracting from their colonies while German capital was deliberately handicapped.

The tragedy of Weimar Germany was not that fascism overpowered democracy, but that centrism surrendered to it. The ruling class, terrified of socialism and unwilling to sacrifice profits, preferred to dismantle democracy rather than risk redistribution. By the early 1930s, parliament had already hollowed itself out through emergency decrees, wage cuts, and deference to capital. Hitler did not overthrow the system; he inherited it.

As I wrote in The Economy of Evil, fascism did not emerge from chaos or irrationality. It was a rational response of a ruling class cornered by its own contradictions. When capitalism could no longer rule by consent, it ruled by coercion. Fascism became the mechanism through which industrialists preserved their property, destroyed unions, and restructured production under the guise of national renewal.

Parenti called it “capitalism in extremis” — the system defending itself with violence when ideology and markets fail. What began as economic crisis under Hindenburg and Brüning matured into political extermination under Hitler. Capital’s contradictions had finally produced their ultimate form: a state that openly fuses corporate, military, and nationalist power to annihilate class opposition.

In the end, the familiar refrain that “communism works only in theory but fails in practice” collapses under scrutiny, because capitalism has failed on both counts. Its theoretical foundations — competition, equilibrium, self-regulation — implode the moment they are practiced. Each stage of capitalist “progress” has revealed a deeper contradiction: the wage squeeze that undermines consumption, the overproduction that destroys markets, the imperial expansion that breeds world wars, and finally, the fascist synthesis that fuses capital with the state. These are not accidents of mismanagement but the logical outcomes of a system that can sustain itself only through crisis, conquest, and coercion. History’s lesson is not that communism failed to live up to its ideals — it is that capitalism inevitably lives down to its own.

Check out all the other arguments as I build the talking points:

In 2017, Canada commissioned a project dedicated to the “Victims of Communism” and hired a Toronto architect to design it. It was entitled the “Arc of Memory” which featured two curving walls totaling 21 meters in length and four meters in height. The wall originally was supposed to feature names of so-called “Victims of Communism.” The original list had 550 names. As we reported earlier, when the list came out it had the unfortunate problem of including Nazis and Nazi collaborators. It wasn’t just ordinary soldiers, but at one point, the wall had people like Ante Pavelić, who was the leader of the Independent State of Croatia. The Independent State of Croatia was so brutal that actual Wehrmacht soldiers expressed disgust. As more and more names were discovered, more and more of them turned out to be Nazi collaborators. At one point, the research showed that over 60% of the names in the Victims of Communism list were Nazis or Nazi collaborators. Unfortunately, as they had already installed the wall, they faced increasing scrutiny, until earlier this week, when they decided to scrap the idea of listing the names altogether.Now, what remains is a large wall dedicated to all the “Victims of Communism”, which according to research by the Canadian government, is a grand total of zero. As with much anti-communist propaganda, this, too, collapsed under a little scrutiny. As we approach Christmas, for the twelve days of Christmas, we shall debunk anti-communist talking points.

CORE DEATH TOLL & HISTORICAL FAILURE ARGUMENTS

1. The “100 Million Deaths” Argument

ECONOMIC THEORY ARGUMENTS

1. Communism works in Theory but Fails in Practice

The Counter-Argument:

This tiresome and oft-repeated non sequitur of a soundbite has been recycled by many anti-communist organizations from Prager-U, TPUSA and most recently, a little over a month ago, Quillette Magazine published an article affirming this ludicrous number. To anti-communists, these inflated statistics are held up as definitive proof of the alleged “barbarism of communism.”

The fundamental flaw in the “100 million deaths” narrative: it treats political ideology as a kind of metaphysical cause of death. Policies are lifted out of context, conditions are ignored, and complex histories are reduced to an inflated scoreboard where people prosecuted for crimes that would be illegal anywhere are reframed as victims of communist persecution.

In that same 1997 edition of the Black Book of Communism, Courtois again asserts that “communist regimes committed crimes involving around one hundred million people, compared to around twenty-five million under Nazism.”(Original French Version available here). Despite this claim being edited out of other editions, the 1997 publication sold over a million copies, was translated into more than 27 languages, and became a primary source for the talking point now repeated by well-funded anti-communist organizations such as TPUSA, Victims of Communism Foundation etc.

Subsequent French and international editions quietly removed Courtois’s “100 million vs. 25 million Nazis” comparison after he was widely criticized—including by his own co-authors—for methodological manipulation and for minimizing Nazi crimes in order to inflate communist ones.

Several of the book’s own contributors immediately rejected Courtois’s claims. Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin both tried to distance themselves from the “100 million” figure as soon as the book was released. They accused Courtois of being fixated on reaching that number, even if it meant manipulating the data to get there. Werth stated plainly that he had never cited twenty million deaths for the Soviet Union, and Margolin likewise insisted that he had never reported one million deaths for Vietnam. Both maintained that Courtois had effectively invented figures in order to hit the symbolic round number he wanted.

Werth and Margolin were not alone. Along with the historian Karel Bartošek, they publicly denounced Courtois’s methodology and the political agenda behind it. Werth, who authored nearly a third of the entire volume in his chapter on the USSR, and Margolin, who wrote the extensive section on Asia, both rejected the way their work was being used. Together with Bartošek, they resigned from Courtois’s editorial board at the journal Communisme in protest, making clear that they did not stand behind the inflated totals or the moral and historical equivalence Courtois attempted to construct.

Stéphane Courtois is a French historian, a director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), and the editor of The Black Book of Communism. He co-founded and directs the journal Communisme. He is known for his transition from being a Maoist activist in his youth to becoming a prominent anti-communist scholar.

Courtois intended the “100 million” figure to serve a central historical and moral argument: to forcefully establish that Communism was ethically equivalent to Nazism and, by a sheer numerical measure of victims, was the “deadliest” political system of the 20th century. The single, round figure functioned as a rhetorical device designed to shock and to create a moral equivalence between the two totalitarian systems—a move that the co-authors, including Werth, vehemently rejected.

But when we examine the numbers with even minimal scrutiny, a striking pattern emerges: many of the deaths folded into this figure were not innocents at all, but rather individuals who had actively participated in fascist collaboration, wartime atrocities, or violent counterrevolutionary activity. In fact, the historical record often shows that communist governments were far more restrained in their responses than their adversaries would ever acknowledge.

First of all, Courtois’s own arithmetic is flawed. He claims:

USSR: 20 million

China: 65 million

Vietnam: 1 million

North Korea: 2 million

Cambodia: 2 million

Eastern Europe: 1 million

Latin America: 150,000

Africa: 1.7 million

Afghanistan: 1.5 million

“International communist movement”: 10,000

When added properly, these numbers total 94.36 million, not 100 million. Their own arithmetic fails. But the fraudulent math is only the first problem.

The Black Book’s fundamental flaw: it treats political ideology as a metaphysical cause of death. Policies are lifted out of context, conditions are ignored, and complex histories are reduced to an inflated scoreboard where people prosecuted for crimes that would be illegal anywhere are reframed as victims of communist persecution.

This methodology produces a shocking result: To understand the full scope of the deception, we must examine who the Black Book counts as “victims of communism.” Nazis and Nazi collaborators comprise the largest category.

The book dedicates significant space to the USSR, and early on makes clear who they’re counting. “However, other crimes on a much larger scale are habitually overlooked, including the murder or death in the gulag of tens of thousands of German soldiers taken prisoner from 1943 to 1945.”2 In other words: Nazis and their collaborators, semantically bleached and redefined to capture the sympathy of the unsuspecting reader.

Later in the book, the authors classify 37,000 captured UPA soldiers as “victims of communism.”3 This framing obscures who these men actually were. The UPA’s brutality was so depraved that even regular Wehrmacht officers lodged complaints with Himmler. One report came from Erwin Bingel, who described Ukrainian militias on horseback, armed with pistols and cavalry swords, riding wildly through a town park. They drove terrified civilians—men, women, and children—before their horses and unleashed a hail of bullets into the human mass. Those not killed outright were cut down with swords. Bingel wrote of this “horde of Ukrainians, let loose and commanded by SS officers,” trampling savagely over human bodies and ruthlessly killing children, mothers, and the elderly—people whose only “crime” was escaping the earlier mass murder, only to be hunted down and slaughtered “like wild animals.”

Page after page, as the book continues its geographic sweep of various nations, who they count as victims are super-obvious. “Political commissars and counterintelligence units in this army, under SMERSH and the NKVD, were deeply involved in such operations. The repression was especially severe in the countries that had sent troops to fight against the Soviet Union—Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia—where the NKVD deported hundreds of thousands to the Soviet gulags.” In other words, countries that invaded the USSR alongside Nazi Germany faced harsh treatment when they lost. The book presents prosecuting enemy combatants who committed untold atrocities alongside the Nazis, as an atrocity.

The Black Book decries ‘systematic persecution’ of the Catholic Church across Eastern Europe (page 410), while omitting that the Church had actively collaborated with fascist regimes. In Slovakia, Catholic priest Jozef Tiso led the Nazi puppet state and oversaw the deportation of 75,000 Jews to death camps. In Croatia, Franciscan priests ran Ustaše concentration camps, whose brutality even shocked Wehrmacht officials. When communist governments prosecuted complicit clergy and reduced the Church’s institutional power, this wasn’t religious persecution - it was accountability for committing the Holocaust.

While the USSR and Eastern European sections at least provide documentation of who was prosecuted—revealing most “victims” were Nazi collaborators, invading soldiers, and Holocaust-complicit clergy—the China section abandons even this pretense of evidence. On page 464, the authors claim 20-43 million people died during the Great Leap Forward. A margin of error of 23 million people—more than the entire population of Australia—reveals a methodology so fundamentally flawed that no serious analysis should proceed from these numbers. Since the China section accounts for 65% of the alleged “Victims of Communism”, we must continue to dismantle it.

Unable to provide documentation for their claim of 20-43 million deaths, the authors resort to pages of cultural philosophy word salad—discussing Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, quoting Chinese philosophers from 500 BC, and noting that the Tang dynasty (960-1127 AD) had harsh punishments. None of this constitutes evidence for deaths during the Great Leap Forward. This is intellectual fraud disguised as scholarship: make enormous claims, provide zero documentation, fill pages with irrelevant cultural commentary, and hope no one notices the complete absence of actual evidence.

Later on in the chapter, the author admits that they do not have actual data. On Page 479, they clearly state, “There is no precise tally of the number of victims.” The authors make their own great leap forward in methodology - from ‘no precise tally’ to ‘necessarily at least one per village’ to 2-5 million dead, all without citing a single named source or explaining how they determined what was ‘necessary.’

Incredibly, the Black Book cites China’s population decline of 60 million between 1850-1873—under the Qing Dynasty, decades before the Communist Party even existed—as context for understanding communist revolution. They admit these deaths resulted from ‘immense rebellions, repeated attacks by Western imperialists, and the growing despair of a population living in abject poverty.’ In other words, capitalist imperialism and the old feudal system killed 60 million people, creating the conditions that led to communist revolution. Yet the Black Book blames communism for attempting to industrialize a country devastated by centuries of imperialist exploitation and regular famine.

As we continue the Asia chapter in the book, both their claims and their orientalism get more outrageous, escalating to the atrocity propaganda that we are familiar with in the build-up to any war. On page 492, they claimed that “children were killed and even boiled and used as fertilizer”, which has a very shady citation by another anti-communist Becker, which ultimately shows that it is a rumor that an anonymous witness heard his parents discuss. As the book moves further, it increases its racism and the atrocity propaganda gets more outrageous. It claims that because of the famine, many people were cannibalized. Again, the source for this one anonymous person, who cannot be verified.

The claims gets more hysterical and the book actually debunks itself to anyone who bothers to read the rest of the Asia sections. The golden admission in the last sentence of the DPRK section, admits to what the critiques already say: “Even if we content ourselves with a figure of 500,000 victims of the primary or even secondary effects of malnutrition (including the usual, unverifiable rumors of cannibalism), we end up with an overall figure of more than 3 million victims in a country of 23 million inhabitants that has lived under Communism for fifty years.”4

Of course, the biggest debunker for the 100 millions of victims of communism is the fact that apparently the government of Canada has not been able to name even 550 of these 100 million of them without running into Nazis and Nazi collaborators. As a recent government study showed that at least 60% of the so-called victims in their memorial wall were Nazis and Nazi collaborators - leading the government to build an accidental communist propaganda monument. They built a wall dedicated to the victims of communism, but in lieu of the uncomfortable truth coming out, they scrapped listing names of these so-called victims. Therefore, in Ottawa, now sits a large wall dedicated with the total number of victims of communism: zero.

As it became obvious to the Western Allies of France, UK and US that the Soviet Union was going to defeat Nazi Germany, they felt the need to regroup their foreign policy strategy. Once again, they turned their hostilities towards the Soviet Union. They welcomed into their midst the natural enemies of the Soviet Union: fascists.

Even before the war ended, the US began gearing up for the war against the Soviet Union, its primary enemy since 1917. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, began gathering intelligence in formerly occupied territories. One such famous example was Frank Wisner, a corporate lawyer, who had recently taken up a job as an operative in the OSS. In 1944, he made his way to Romania. According to later released records, his team was tasked with finding German records, not for the purposes of gathering intelligence on Nazi Germany, but to find intelligence about the Soviet Union. Within these records, the OSS found a list of collaborators, who were anti-communist, making them prime recruits for aiding the West after the war.

As the Red Army advanced further westward in 1945, many German officials realized the futility of their cause and began to plan for their future. Among them was Reinhard Gehlen, who had been in charge of Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East), a military intelligence organization that gathered intelligence on the Soviet Union and other Eastern front countries. Gehlen possessed files of all the "anti-communist activists" or Nazi collaborators within the Soviet Union, without whom the Nazis could not carry out their war and the accompanying atrocities on the Eastern Front.

Gehlen shrewdly avoided being captured by the Soviet Forces and contacted the American Forces. After a short interrogation, US intelligence flew him to Washington in the summer of 1945. He offered a deal: in exchange for immunity from prosecution for the horrendous war crimes committed under his authority, he would provide his extensive network of collaborators and agents in the East for use by the US in their cold-war crusade against the Soviet Union.

The US authorities enthusiastically accepted the proposal. Gehlen was not only rewarded with amnesty but was later installed as the head of the West German intelligence agency, the BND. In turn, he continued his crusade against the Soviet Union - the same one he began with Hitler.

Amongst the treasure trove of information that Gehlen provided was a list of collaborators: the Hungarian Iron Cross, the Romanian Iron Guard, the Croatian Ustaše, and, most importantly, Ukrainian nationalists from the notorious Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Armed with this information, the U.S. and its allies began recruiting the worst of the war criminals for the Cold War against communism.

The OUN was founded in 1929 by western Ukrainians from Galicia. Their mission was always to create an independent and ethnically homogenous Ukraine. At this time, much of Galicia was occupied by Poland, making Poland their main enemy. Soon after their formation, they piqued the interests of German intelligence agencies. As Weimar Germany transformed into the Third Reich, they received training and weapons to form auxiliary units, later known as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).

The UPA was unparalleled in its barbarity, detailed earlier - with the Lvov massacre and anti-partisan expeditions which lead to the extermination of entire villages in Belarus – their brutality shocked even Nazi officials. Though their declaration of statehood briefly irked the Nazi leadership, they remained active on the battlefield, destroying entire communities in their wake

In 1942, they began ethnically cleansing areas of western Ukraine and Poland of non-Ukrainians. The campaign began on February of 1942, when a UPA detachment massacred over 150 people in the Polish village of Parosle. They continued attacking villages near the border, brutally murdering civilians. By July of 1943, UPA operations had expanded to the entire Volynhia region.

The UPA targeted various villages, where bands of men aged 16-50, sometimes armed with machetes and pitchforks, went on rampages, slaughtering anyone they encountered. In their wake, entire villages were brutally massacred.

The most infamous massacre happened on "Bloody Sunday," July11-12, 1943, when UPA units simultaneously attacked over 99 Polish villages. Victims were burned alive while they were attending Sunday mass, and even children were not spared, as evidenced by memorials to the Volynhia massacres.

In 1944, as the Red Army turned the tide of the war, UPA units retreated. After the war, many ended up in displaced person camps in West Germany. The Yalta agreement stipulated that major war criminals would be investigated by the foreign secretaries of US, UK and USSR. Despite Soviet lists identifying UPA members for crimes so heinous they shocked Nazi officials, the OSS and MI6 recruited them as assets.

While the US technically banned Nazi war criminals from entering the country, these rules were purposefully ignored for these collaborationist war criminals. In one egregious example, a man named John Demjanjuk entered the US despite listing Sobibor and Trebelinka – Nazi death camps – as former residences. Even with these clear red flags, immigration officials approved his application. Later, it was revealed he had been a guard at both camps, and exhibited a particular sadism against his victims.

Demjunik was only one amongst thousands escaped justice with US and UK assistance. Some fled to Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Australia and Canada. One of the most famous descendants of Ukrainian Nationalists is Chrystia Freeland, the former deputy prime minister of Canada. She was second only to the Prime Minister. Her grandfather, Michael Chomiak, was an infamous propagandist for the Third Reich who wrote an ode to Adolf Hitler on his 50th birthday.

In their role as CIA assets, former UPA members transformed into agents of chaos. In the employ of the US government, they were mobilized into project AERODYNAMIC. According to declassified CIA documents, "The purpose of Project AERODYNAMIC is to provide for the exploitation and expansion of the Anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance movement for cold war and hot war purposes. Such groups as the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (UHVR), its military adjunct, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN all in the Ukraine, the Foreign Representation of the Supreme Council of Liberation (ZPUHVR) in Western Europe and the United States, and other Ukrainian organizations such as the Foreign Sections of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (ZchOUN), etc., will be utilized."

Scores of Ukrainian Nationalists were dropped into Ukrainian territory after the war, in order to commit acts of terrorism on USSR territory. While they did succeed in committing the acts of terrorism, they were shortly apprehended, and the operation was designated as a failure.

The influence of the UPA and OUN didn't just end there, they played an integral part in the propaganda campaign against the Soviet Union. With it, was the obvious rewriting history through their future organizations.

At the height of World War II, in 1943, at the instigation of the Nazis, various collaborators joined together to form an organization called the "Committee of Subjugated Nations"(CSN). Their goal: the complete dismemberment of the Soviet Union. After the war, in 1946, with the funding from US, UK and West Germany, the CSN rebranded itself as the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN). Its president: Yaroslavl Stetsko, the self-proclaimed leader of "Independent Ukraine", a Nazi collaborationist government. He enthusiastically oversaw the massacres.

It wasn't only the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators that the ABN embraced. The organization incorporated fascists from all regions - Belarusians, Romanians, Hungarians and Croatians - all of them Nazi collaborators. In the 1980s, a list of its central committee members was distributed. Of the eleven members in total, at least seven were accused of being war criminals.

The ABN published newsletters glorifying Nazi collaborators. They were central to the West's propaganda efforts. They also started radio networks such as "Radio Liberation from Bolshevism." On March 1, 1953, they broadcast from transmitters in Lampertheim to the states east of Germany. They instigated violence and acts of terrorism. While the signals were intermittently jammed from these states, some of their propaganda went through.

With their radio power, and also their newsletters, various Nazi collaborators were rebranded as innocent people fleeing from "communist persecution." Their influence stretched throughout Western Europe, the US and Canada. They were so successful in these efforts, that inside the US and Canada, there are many statues and memorials dedicated to these collaborators. Famous ones include a Roman Shukhevich statue in Edmonton, Canada. In New Jersey, a memorial has been erected at the grave site of Mykolo Lebed.

At their height, their propaganda efforts were so successful that they were granted an audience with American Presidents. ABN and its other collaborationist organizations began with the mythology of "Captive Nations" within the Soviet Union. They started another committee called the "Captive Nations" committee. And of course, in July 1959, Lev Dobrianky, longtime leader of the Nationalist Ukrainian Congress Committee convinced President Eisenhower to sign his resolution: "Captive Nations Week." In a letter to Eisenhower, an offshoot organization known as "American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations"(AF-ABN) called this resolution, "one of the greatest documents of modern history."

Later, long-time ABN President Yaroslav Stetsko was granted an audience with President Ronald Reagan. Shortly afterwards, in 1986, President Reagan enacted Black Ribbon Day, which was "a day of protest against the Soviet Union" during the Cold War. It officially mourns Nazi collaborators and rebrands them as "Victims of Communism."

Of course, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation was started by Lev Dobriansky. In the past few years, people were scandalized to learn that many of their memorials were to Nazi War Criminals. Two years ago, in Canada, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation commissioned a wall to list the names of these so-called victims. Their list had people like Ante Pavelić (the head of the Independent State of Croatia) and Roman Shukhevich.

ABN's activities didn't just end with propaganda. They created other organizations to provide paramilitary aid and training to right-wing death squads worldwide. These umbrella organizations included: the Ukrainian Youth Organization. In conjunction with the Taiwanese and South Korean governments, ABN also helped found the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). The WACL's mission statement: " To train anti-communist leaders to build a better world imbued with freedom and to overcome the communist menace."

In Latin America, a branch of the WACL emerged, known as the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation (CAL), which created paramilitary death squads. They enacted untold violence in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, which included massacres like Los Erres and El Mozote.

The irony of these organizations was that they claimed they were against "communist violence" but at the same time, they funded paramilitary organizations that unleashed unimaginable violence against "communists" (which was loosely defined and sometimes encompassed entire villages).

Part 2 coming soon

The President’s suggestion was no less than genocide. However, the obedient reporters in the press conference had no appropriate pushbacks that was commensurate with the genocidal implications of his suggestion. The US press knows all too well how to concern troll about feasibility when it comes to policy proposals that aid the average person. Look no further than any interview with Bernie Sanders during his presidential campaign. Whenever he suggested Medicare-for-all, he was peppered with questions like, „How are you going to implement this?” And „how will you pay for it?” (Despite, the US being completely monetarily sovereign).

Prime Minister Netanyahu and his cabinet met with this proposal filled with glee. They even suggested that Palestinians ought be relocated to Puntland (an autonomous region in Somalia), Somaliland or Morocco. For a country that builds its entire reason for existence on the Holocaust, they have willfully ignored (or perhaps embraced) the historical parallels.

While anti-semitism and anti-communism always remained the core doctrine of Nazi philosophy, as illustrated by their mythological boogeyman „the Judeo-Bolshevik.” Upon coming into power, the Nazis slowly enacted their anti-Jewish policies. Each new policy further restricted the lives of Jews under the control of the Reich. After Hitler was appointed Chancellor the laws were enacted successively to further restrict the livelihood of Jews.

On April 7, 1933, Jews were banned from joining professional associations. At first, Jews were excluding from working in universities and in government positions. Soon, the list of professional bans expanded. Jewish doctors were forbidden from receiving reimbursements from health insurance funds. Later that year, the government revoked licenses of Jewish tax collectors. They imposed a maximum quota of 1.5% on admissions of “non-aryans.” In 1934, Jews were banned from performing on stage as actors and musicians. In 1935, Nazis introduced Nuremberg laws which prevented Jews from getting treatments in hospitals. Starting in 1937, Jews were forced to register their assets. Finally, in August of 1938, Jews were given identity cards that marked their Jewish status, which kept them separate from Germans. Along with this, the Nazi government started dabbling with ways to remove all Jews from the Reich.

It was in 1938, where Nazis and other far-right governments held talks to remove Jews from Europe. One of the first proposals was the Madagascar Plan.

Ironically, the Madagascar plan didn’t start with Nazi Germany, but in neighboring Poland, where a far-right, anti-semitic government reigned. Despite western mythology giving Poland the status of „dual victimhood” of Nazis and Soviets, reality of Poland was far different. Poland’s extreme right-wing government had begun policies to exclude Jews from Polish life, a few decades before the Nazis. As early as 1919, armed Polish militias began ethnic cleansing campaigns. In 1920, TheJewish Daily News reported that there were so many restrictions that it was almost “impossible” for Jews to make a living in Poland.

It was amidst this background that in 1936, Poland began its negotiations with France on the possibility of forcibly relocating its large Jewish population to the French colony of Madagascar. After much negotiations, France finally allowed Poland to send a few envoys to study the feasibility of the mass relocation in 1937. To lead the expedition, Poland sent Solomon Dyk, Leon Alter and Major Mieczysław Bohdan Lepenski . All three of them came back with similar analysis. Lepenski said it was only possible to settle 5,000-7,000 families in Madagascar, while Alter concluded that only 500 families could settle there. The Polish Government wanted to send 50,000 families per year. Despite these feasibility studies, the Polish Government continued the push for Madagascar as a potential spot for deporting Jews.

However, their plans were scuppered when, in April 1938, a new government came into power In France. After seeing the deteriorating situation for Jews in Austria and Germany, the French government realized that they would have to deal with a larger population of Jews, and they soured on the idea.

However, like all bad ideas, it did not die with the French Government’s refusal. The Reich, for some time, had been considering ways empty the areas their lands of their Jewish population.

In July 1938, at the behest of leaders from various Jewish communities, President Franklin D. Roosevelt convened a conference in Evian France to figure out the fate of the Jews in Europe, given the deteriorating situation in many countries. Delegates from 32 countries attended it. The Nazi regime, neither attended the conference nor sent delegates. None of the countries in attendance were able to come up with a satisfactory plan to protect or house Jewish residents in their lands.

The Nazi government closely monitored this conference and based on the unresolved status of Jews. As the conference left the status of the Jews unresolved, they used this to further their anti-semitic propaganda. Alfred Rosenberg immediately published a series of anti-semitic articles. In the articles, Alfred Rosenberg mentioned that no country wanted to accept the a larger Jewish population of refugees. He used this for his propaganda purposes to show that Jews were unwanted and also dangerous.

Around this time, the Nazi leadership convened in order to plot a some kind of “Final Solution” for Jews. One of the ideas that repeatedly came around was to send Jews to a far away lands. Two places that were mentioned was Guyana, which was controlled by the British and Madagascar.

In November of 1938, Kristallnacht occurred and thousands of Jewish businesses were vandalized. Thousands of more Jews were arrested. With the domestic persecution of Jews, the German Foreign Minister Joachim Ribbentrop convened with French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet. They discussed the possibility of reopening the idea of sending German Jews to Madagascar. The French Minister replied by saying that France, too, had 10,000 Jews that they were trying to get rid of, but Madagascar was deemed not feasible for them.

Later, in February of 1939, Alfred Rosenberg had a fiery speech where he wanted to create a police state, a reservation of some sort, not just for German Jews, but Jews all over Eastern Europe. He said,"I emphasize the word reservation, for there can be no question of a Jewish state, either now or in the future.” His plan would be similar to having Jews in a concentration camp, but the concentration camp would be located in a far away country.

In September of 1939, Germany began invading Poland. At the dawn of the invasion, Adolf Eichmann and Dr. Franz Stahlecker, chief security of police in Prague, discussed deporting Jews under the control of the Reich to Poland as a stop-gap measure while they worked out the details of the Madagascar plan. They presented this idea to Reinhard Heydrich, who eagerly created a Jewish Reservation inside of Poland. They chose the city of Lublin to build this ghastly reservation. With it, began the first wave of expulsion of Jews. According to a London Times correspondent who witnessed this debacle, “early in October the Jewish Community of Mahrich-Octrau (on the former Prussian-Austrian frontier] was ordered to compile a register of all male Jews between the ages of 17 and 55 and to call for volunteers for ‚retaining camp’ in connection with the proposed Jewish reservation round Lublin.” Further, „Each man was ordered to take a knapsack.. food for 3 days… about 1000 men were taken in buses to there railway station”

Jews who arrived in Lublin were forced to work in construction, under dangerous conditions. They were subjected to intense starvation, as their daily rations were not enough to sustain the population. Many died as a result.

After Germany invaded France in 1940, and France’s rather quick surrender, Germany thought they finally could enact the Madagascar plan. They controlled France, and in turn, controlled the colonies of France, too. With the records of the French Colonial Department open to him, Eichmann prepared a report detailing the plan of exiling Jews to Madagascar. In his plan, Madagascar was destined to become a police state under the leadership of the Reich, where four million Jews would be deported. Logically, the transport to Madagascar would be provided by two ships a day, and each of the ships would transport 1500 Jews. He envisioned deporting all the Jews to Madagascar within four years.

This plan was leaked to the western presses from Italy in July of 1940, and it received the official endorsement of the Third Reich in August of 1940. However, the logistics of the plan depended on Germany having a sea route to Madagascar through the Straight of Gibraltar and down through Africa. But, the British Navy enacted a blockade of German ships. To achieve the sea-route, Germany tried an extensive bombing campaign in UK, which left England battered but still standing.

With the ongoing war, England used her superior naval power, which she possessed because of the vast number of colonies, held onto through sheer force. This blocked any possibility of Germany having a naval route to carry out The Madagascar Plan.

In 1941, Germany began targeting who they considered their Main enemy: The Soviet Union. They commenced Operation Barbarossa, which began with indiscriminate bombings of cities in the Soviet Union. Upon occupation, they enacted a version of genocide, so brutal, that it was hitherto, unprecedented. In each town, the Nazis, with the help of many local collaborators, rounded up Jews and communists. They summarily shot them. The scale of the massacre was so great, that sometimes, blood leaked through the water table, and the tap water turned red.

The brutal genocide the perpetuated in the East had its cost. It affected the soldiers’ morale, as they had to physically gun down men, women and children. Babies were massacred by throwing them against tree stumps. Soon, they realized this was an inefficient way to generate the massive scale of genocide in their plan. They had to come up with a cleaner and more efficient way to perpetuate mass death.

To achieve this end, in January of 1942, Nazis gathered in the city of Wannsee, which is a suburb near Berlin, to formalize their extermination plan. Reinhardt Heydrich laid out the plan to carry out the final solution: utilize the labor of the victims for the massive factories, roads and construction projects, and those who couldn’t work, would be subjected to a “special treatment.” The “special treatment” was Zyklon-B, a poisonous gas they would use to gas many victims at once. It was relatively cleaner than the plan they enacted in the east. Most importantly, it gave the soldiers a psychological distance from the acts

After the conference, they made enacted their plans seamlessly. Concentration camps were built. These concentration camps provided a source of free labor for German industries. After the laborers were no longer able to work, they had massive industrial gas chambers to execute thousands in a matter of minutes. After the war, researchers documented that the Nazis had established a total of 42,500 camps.

While, the Madagascar plan didn’t come to fruition, it still acted as an important plank to slowly convince the population to commit genocide. It allowed the population to get accustomed to thinking it is okay to mass deport Jews. It established a set of humans whose lives had lower value. It allowed for people to pretend that they were not participating in one of the most brutal genocides in history.

Now, 80 years after the liberation of Europe from Nazi Rule, Israel is engaging in a genocidal campaign. They have been mirroring the methods of those who engaged in genocide before them. Palestinians have been systematically dehumanized. A database gathered over 500+ statements made by Israeli government that shows genocidal incitement. Avigdor Lieberman, who has served as Deputy Prime Minister under two Israeli administrations said, “There are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the biblical story about the children of Amalek, about a race of people who were inherently evil, and who were justifiably wiped from the face of the earth. the Bible said, “Nothing could serve as a reminder of Amalek’s name—not even an animal about which it could be said, ‘This animal belonged to Amalek.” He later said, “Remember what Amalek did to you” referring to Hamas and Gaza. The inference is clear that he was inciting genocide.

Even before the start of Israel’s bombing campaign, Palestinians were already living like they were in a ghetto from the 1940s. In Gaza, Israel restricted everything that went in and out of Gaza. They even restricted the calories that went into Gaza. In the West Bank, Palestinians are only permitted to walk through certain roads, subjected to hours-long checkpoints. Even ambulances were prevented from traveling freely.

In today’s world, Isreal’s excuse of „fighting terrorism” is met with no skepticism or analysis. Israel’s response to the October 7^th attack, unleashed a genocidal bombing campaign, sending two million people in Gaza to starvation. Withholding food aid, until many died of starvation. But, everyone has a right to resist a hostile occupying force. Similarly, Nazi Germany also cited „banditry” for their reason for the brutal response. Historians dubbed their response as “Genocidal Counterinsurgency” After the Belarusian Partisans killed Nazi officials, Nazis responded by wiping out over 600 villages in Belarus. Jewish Partisans blew up entire train lines and derailed trains. Once again, Nazi response was brutal, they rounded up entire towns and villages of people and summarily executed them. After, Reinhard Heydrich was murdered by resistance groups, entire town of Lidice, in the Czech Republic was destroyed. Looking back today, no reasonable person even questions the actions of the Partisans who are seen righteous in their fight against a genocidal occupying force. The Nazi retaliation is further used to show the brutality of the Third Reich.

Israel has successfully weaponized the holocaust for cynical purposes: anti-semitism is a weapon to be wielded to silence any critiques of Israel. For decades, Israeli politicians have compared Palestinians to animals that need to be eradicated. The Times of Israel once ran an article entitled „When is Genocide permissible.” The US, historically, has provided Israel with impunity in the UN Security Council. While, it is unlikely that Israel will realize their Madagascar plan, we must think of it as just another rung on the ladder to furthering their genocidal plans and intentions. Unfortunately, the world has not learned its lessons from the past. Most countries are sitting on the sidelines, while the Trump administration will continue the policies of all the predecessor administrations for allowing Israel to continue the genocidal project.

It, of course, did not used to be this way. Though often equally ill-informed are the myriad of people who wish to take the observance of the holiday “back to its religious roots.”  Whatever those religious roots may be often goes unsaid however, as if there's a universal (and correct) understanding of what they are.

The reality of Christmas in its current form is an invention purely in service and worship of United States “consumerist” culture.  This is true, this is widely understood.  More tragically however, is that despite this wide understanding of the nature of the current holiday, the memory of what was taken in order to instill this cripplingly draining ritual into society was both made and allowed to fade into total obscurity.  It can be hard to convince anybody familiar with the current holiday customs what once was.

We Feast On The Last Of Saturn's Sons

Absent from the stereotyped complaints of “lost is the true spirit of Christmas!” tends to be a firm grasp of its indisputably pagan origins.  Long before where we are now, what was celebrated in the window of time occupied by the contemporary “Christmas season” throughout England and Western Europe was, for all intents and purposes, Saturnalia.  A celebration of the harvest, of the readiness of the coming year's beer supply, in the honor of the freshly slaughtered animals of which the finest were to be consumed post haste before the need for preservation see to it they would be rendered far less palatable by the salting process.  A year's end salve applied to the abrasions of the standard scarcities and toils of feudal Europe.

In fact, more than anything, this celebration was a celebration of the arrival of the time on minimum work. For much of it had already been done diligently, and it was time for the commoner to enjoy what was left of the fruits of that labor that had not yet been paid in tax and tribute and was not yet about to go out to the same ends.

Naturally, these profoundly pagan origins of the celebration were of course not lost on the Puritans who during their time of prominence in England and the “new world” colonies, as observed by the Reverend Increase Mather (a name to raise a red flag for students of the Salem Witch Trials):

Christmas Holidayes were at first invented and institut in compliance with the Pagan Festivals, of old observed at that very time of the Year. This Stuckius has fully cleared. And Hospinian speaketh judiciously, when he saith, that he doth not believe that they who first of all ob∣served the Feast of Christ's Nativity in the latter end of December, did it as thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian.1

This of course, is far from the most unreasonable utterances and contentions the Reverend Mather ever brought to the table, given that Christian scripture in fact gives no date to mark the Nativity.  Puritanical belief held that were the Nativity to be celebrated on a particular day, God would have spoon-fed that date to the flock.  Who could argue?

For those wishing to see the “Christmas holiday” returned to its Christian religious roots will be quite disappointed to find that there are exactly none, and ironically, this in fact may be the 'Scroogiest' of anti-Christmas sentiment, especially within the context of the history of the United States where the near entirety of contemporary Christmas tradition was invented and inorganically injected into society; the Puritan's rejection of Christmas is effectively a universally acknowledged reality of scholarship on the subject, in keeping with the colonial clergy's heavy handed interest in the excision of all things “pagan” from society to the point 17th century New England almanacs had purged common names for days of the week from the text due to their non-Christian and/or pagan origin and nature (Saturday/Saturn's Day, Thursday/Thor's Day).  The date of December 25th would remain unnoticed or attached with a notice courts would be in session as it was but a simple work day like any other.2

The so-called “Protestant Work Ethic” and Christmas Day remain, into the 21st century, in constant conflict.  Working on Christmas Day in the US is far from uncommon, and it's easy enough to dismiss as the harsh reality of the demands capitalism imposes upon the labor pool rather than any desire to enforce puritanical religious conviction, though it's far less easy to spend one's life overlooking the constant historical and contemporaneous overlap of the two.  And as was stated before, for the commoner, this was the time of minimum work.  The contradiction abounds.

But thus far, this is all theory.  What of the practice?  We know that the Puritan's opposed “Christmas,” the noun, but what of its verb?

The Merry Masters Of Misrule

The celebration of this nominally-Christian Saturnalia holiday under the puritans was, compared to contemporaneous celebration, an intense spectacle.  For hundreds of years, people would take to the streets in revelry.  The aforementioned Reverend Mather would cite William Perkins in his polemic against the tradition:

“William Perkins argued that “the Feast of Christ’s Nativity (commonly so called) is not spent in praising God, but in Revelling, Dicing, Carding, Masking, Mumming, and in all licentious Liberty for the most part, as though it were some Heathenish Feast of Ceres or Bacchus.”3

The “Christmas” holiday once more resembled what a 21st century US citizen would associate with a weekend in a Vegas Comic Con than a sombre religious holiday or the month long shopping spree engaged in today.  Particularly singled out was the more or less forgotten activity of “mumming,” at least in relation to the Christmas holiday.  As of the 21st century it's very much known commonly as “cosplay.”  Historian John Asthon cites another puritan on the practice:

In 1440, one captain John Gladman, a man ever true and faithful to God and the King, and constantly sportive, made public disport with his neighbours at Christmas. He traversed the town on a horse as gaily caparisoned as himself, preceded by the twelve months, each dressed in character. After him crept the pale attenuated figure of Lent, clothed in herring skins, and mounted on a sorry horse, whose harness was covered with oyster shells. A train, fantastically garbed, followed. Some were clothed as bears, apes, and wolves; others were tricked out in armour; a number appeared as harridans, with blackened faces and tattered clothes, and all kept up a promiscuous fight. Last of all marched several carts, whereon a number of fellows, dressed as old fools, sat upon nests, and pretended to hatch young fools.[4]

Compared to current celebration, this may as well have been written by Hunter S. Thompson.  It's almost hard to not hear echoing in your head condescending scoffs and derisive comments about what is essentially Saturn's Great Big Year End Furry Parade.

This riotous revelry crescendoing to the business end of the long arm of the law was almost a tradition in and of itself, accounted for across hundreds of years:

“Christmas revelries were sometimes carried to excess, and needed curbing with the strong hand of the law, an early instance of which we find in Letter Book I. of the Corporation of the City of London, fol. 223, 6 Henry V., a.d. 1418.

"The Mair and Aldermen chargen on þe kynges byhalf, and þis Cite, þat no manere persone, of what astate, degre, or condicoun þat euere he be, duryng þis holy tyme of Christemes be so hardy in eny wyse to walk by nyght in eny manere mommyng, pleyes, enterludes, or eny oþer disgisynges with eny feynyd berdis, peyntid visers, diffourmyd or colourid visages in eny wyse, up peyne of enprisonement of her bodyes and makyng fyne after þe discrecioun of þe Mair and Aldremen; ontake þat hit be leful to eche persone for to be honestly mery as he can, within his owne hous dwellyng. And more ouere þei charge on þe Kynges byhalf, and þe Cite, þat eche honest persone, dwellyng in eny hye strete or lane of þis Citee, hang out of her house eche night, duryng þis solempne Feste, a lanterne with a candell þer in, to brenne as long as hit may endure, up peyne to pay ivd, to þe chaumbre at eche tyme þat hit faillith."[5]

To phrase this court record in more aggressively modern English: the LARPers partied too hard, had the fur-suits beaten off their bodies by the cops and were then charged a fine for having too good of a time, and were threatened with prison time if the state sanctioned violence didn't get the message through.

However, the “Christmas” spirit of the masses remained indomitable, and over two hundred years later we have this account:

“[O]ne Saunders, from Lincolnshire, for carrying revelry too far. Saunders and others, at Blatherwick, had appointed a Lord of Misrule over their festivities. This was perfectly lawful, and could not be gainsaid. But they had resolved that he should have a lady, or Christmas wife; and probably there would have been no harm in that, if they had not carried the matter too far. They, however, brought in as bride one Elizabeth Pitto, daughter of the hog-herd of the town. Saunders received her, disguised as a parson, wearing a shirt or smock for a surplice. He then married the Lord of Misrule to the hog-herd's daughter, reading the whole of the marriage service from the Book of Common Prayer. All the after ceremonies and customs then in use were observed, and the affair was carried to its utmost extent. The parties had time to repent at leisure in prison.”[6]

We must take great pains to emphasize to ourselves the nature of this “Lord of Misrule” concept, its importance to the celebration and ultimately the core of the dissolution of the celebratory time of the people into a reformation of socially enforced plebeian consumption, as well as take pains to examine why mumming—and by extension, caroling—were singled out as such particularly offensive to puritanical sensibilities.

When this holiday belonged to the people, the purpose was to stand on its head the social order that by then had accrued upon each man, woman and child a year of indignities inflicted by the oppression of the so-called “well born” and enforce a time of “misrule” upon their self-styled masters.  The shirking of hegemony can clearly be seen as paramount, as 18th century historian Henry Bourne, educated under Reverend Thomas Atherton, writes in Antiquitates Vulgares:

“There is another Custom observed at this Time, which is called among us Mumming; which is a changing of Clothes between Men and Women; who when dress'd in each others Habits, go from one Neighbour's House to another, and partake of their Christmas-Cheer, and make merry with them in Disguise, by dancing and singing, and such like Merriments.

THIS kind of Custom received a deserved Blow from the Church, [...] where it was decreed […] the Faithful should no longer observe them: That the publick Dancings of Women should cease, as being […] therefore quite averse to the Christian Life. They there∣fore decreed, that no Man should be Cloathed with a Woman's Garment, no Woman with a Man's.

[I]t is the Occasion of much Uncleanness and Debauchery, and […] the Woman shall not wear that which partaineth unto a Man, neither shall a Man put on a Woman's Garment; for all that do so, are Abomination unto the LORD thy GOD.”[7]

The defiance of the patriarchate was clear and defensive measures were taken to strike this down wherever possible.  This of course was not confined to the act of mumming, but extended to caroling in the same overly pious tone:

“Was this performed with that Reverence and Decency, which are due to a Song of this Nature, in Honour of the Nativity, and Glo∣ry to our LORD, it would be very commend∣able; but to sing it, as is generally done, in the midst of Rioting and Chambering (fornication), and Wantoness, is no Honour, but Disgrace; no Glory, but an Affront to that Holy Season, a Scandal to Religion, and a Sin against CHRIST”[8]

To put it mildly, the Christians of the 17th and 18th century were wildly unfriendly to what the masses considered their Christmas celebration.  And the closer one looks the more apparent the underlying reason for it is, and here again we plumb the depths of Increase Mather's mind:

“In the Saturnalian Days, Masters did wait upon their Servants…. The Gentiles called Saturns time the Golden Age, because in it there was no servitude, in Commemoration whereof on his Festival, Servants must be Masters.” This practice, like so many others, was simply picked up and transposed to Christmas, where those who were low in station became “Masters of Misrule.”[9]

Yet again, we are indeed reminded that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle, so on and so forth, et cetera.

But this barely scratches the surface.  “Caroling,” a leadenly boring institution as it is now was once the frontline of this ritualized social inversion.  The costumed antics of the mummers were one thing, “caroling” in the old days was a completely different animal.  Stephen Nissenbaum writes:

“At other times of the year it was the poor who owed goods, labor, and deference to the rich. But on this occasion the tables were turned—literally. The poor—most often bands of boys and young men—claimed the right to march to the houses of the well-to-do, enter their halls, and receive gifts of food, drink, and sometimes money as well. And the rich had to let them in—essentially, to hold “open house.” Christmas was a time when peasants, servants, and apprentices exercised the right to demand that their wealthier neighbors and patrons treat them as if they were wealthy and powerful. The Lord of the Manor let the peasants in and feasted them. In return, the peasants offered something of true value in a paternalistic society—their goodwill.”[10]

This was not just a year-end harvest celebration but a most diplomatic effort of the masses to right a most uneven score through pageantry, high spirits, flowing drink and gaming.  An olive branch extended to the oppressor by the oppressed that so greatly outnumbered them in exchange for yet another coming year of toil on their behalf for little gratitude.

The purpose here was to leverage an exchange of what was effectively stolen surplus labor in exchange for a season of being treated as a real person instead of the exploiter of real people.  Upon exchange, the party truly started and these early carolers—roving bands of well-liquored toilers—would break out in true revelry, dancing and singing songs with lyrics designed to never quite lose sight of the real spirit of the season, one particularly pointed example:

“We have come to claim our right...

And if you don't open up your door,

We'll lay you flat upon the floor”[11]

And returning to Stephen Nissenbaum's writings we see:

“At each stop they wish their patron a successful harvest, the fruits of which are to be shared with them (“God send our master a cup of good beer…. God send our mistress a good Christmas pie …”). Each verse amounts to a toast that ends in a fresh round of drinks (“With my wassailing bowl I drink to thee”)—to the master and mistress, to their horse, to their cow, to anything at all that can be toasted.

“It was not enough for the landlord to let the peasants in and feed them. On this one occasion he had to share with them his choicest food and drink, his private stock.”[12]

The puritans were able to do away with these practices, and to most people, it remains as if they never actually existed.  Such celebration today would be unfathomable to most.  Nissenbaum goes on to note a particular quote in John Taylor's The Complaint of Christmas from a most displeased Englishman on the nature of the disappeared festivities:

“[L]iberty and harmless sports … [by] which the toiling plowswain and labourer were wont to be recreated, and their spirits and hopes revived for a whole twelve months […] extinct and put out of use … as if they never had been…. Thus are the merry lords of misrule suppressed by the mad lords of bad rule at Westminster.”[13]

Here Comes Santa Claus

By the early the 19th century, Washington Irving had published “A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker,” a satirical history of New York City.  While it did a fair bit to annoy the descendants of the Dutch colonizers, the lasting effect of the writing was for Irving to achieve wide fame and Saint Nicholas as written of in the book as being viewed by the Dutch as patron and guardian, carved into the prow of the vessel that brought them to their to-be colony, to become a household name.[14]

The following year, John Pintard, the founder of the New York Historical Society would present to his group a pamphlet featuring the likeness off the saint, depicted as a stern bishop holding a rod.  Pintard himself was in a minority of men who favored an austere and “domesticated” Christmas, and this was a step towards him making his preference a near-universal standard.

In his depiction of our Santa Claus in utero, we see Saint Nicholas flanked to each side by a little girl with an apron full of treats, and a little boy wailing over a pile of sticks left for him, accompanied by the poem:

“Saint Nicholas, good holy man!

Put on the Tabard [jacket], best you can,

Go, clad therewith, to Amsterdam

From Amsterdam to Hispanje [Spain],

Where apples bright of Oranje,

And likewise those granate [pomegranate] surnam’d,

Roll through the streets, all free unclaimed.

Saint Nicholas, my dear good friend!

To serve you, ever was my end,

If you will, now, me something give,

I’ll serve you ever while I live.”[15]

The final nail into the coffin of this people's holiday would begin to be driven in.

Saint Nicholas's association with giving of gifts and the protection of children would make him a natural mascot for a more “family-friendly” holiday focused on children than the raucous celebration of the adults who worked all year; by 1821, William Gilley (also a New Yorker) published a book containing the poem of anonymous authorship titled “The Child's Friend,” introducing the world to 'Santeclaus', a magical figure pulled by reindeer on a sleigh filled with rewards for well-behaved children.[16]

Not but two years after that, “A Visiti From Saint Nick”—better known as “Twas The Night Before Christmas”—would be published.  Clement Clarke Moore, it's author, would borrow heavily from conceptual sketches written by his friend, the original Knickerbocker himself, Washington Irving and offer up a tale of a “magical jolly elf” that arrives not on Christmas but the night before, where it is considered that Moore "deftly shifted the focus away from Christmas Day with its still-problematic religious associations" (widely seen by Protestants still as a result of "Catholic ignorance and deception") resulting in "New Yorkers embraced Moore's child-centered version of Christmas as if they had been doing it all their lives."[17]  Despite Moore's day-job as a seminary professor, his poem would be stripped of religious tones, secularizing it on the whole, no doubt further adding to its solidification.

Later, Irving would (with backing from John Jacob Astor, his consummate cash-spigot) found the Saint Nicholas Society of New York City, a fraternal organization for the descendants of the early Dutch colonizers masquerading as a charity that would be used to keep these poems in constant circulation.  A mascot was born.

The contemporary Christmas holiday now revolves entirely around this bit of iconography.  Solidified in its full form by 1873 when Godey's Lady's Book featured a picture of Santa Claus encircled by elves and toys with the caption “Here we have an idea of the preparations that are made to supply the young folks with toys at Christmas time.”[18]

By now what today would be called “The Disneyfication” of Christmas was complete.  An amalgamation of Father Christmas and Saint Nicholas commanding a legion of elves that manufacture toys for the world's children, as opposed to acknowledging the toys as made by laborers, whom the holiday used to be for.  Little left but a means of instilling early in children commodity fetishism on a cultist level, pounced on (most famously at Coca-Cola) by every hack ad man close to the world over.

The key to remember, when confronted with the notion that you do not “hate Christmas,” but you in fact “hate capitalism,” is to always respond “yeah, that's the point.”  There is no Christmas and there never really was.  It was a “Christian” adjacent branding on a pagan holiday, peasants were only ever “allowed” to celebrate in the first place under Christian Europe as part of a bargain wherein the church would instate this as a “Christian” holiday and allow its celebration per the old customs so long as everyone “went along” with the Christian thing and didn't actively “pagan it up too much,” as it were.[19]  It was a righteous annual protection racket run in revelry by the laborers that made society possible, reduced to crass ritualized consumption.

Participation in “Christmas” at this point is little but the act of paying your oppressors a yearly commodity tax, with a smile, for the privilege of being oppressed by them, and nodding along as it is declared “the most wonderful time of the year.”  If ever there was a time to invoke the “RETVRN” sentiment, this is it.  You are as right to hate Christmas as it is right to rebel.

I want to take a look at the history of Anticommunism within the US Labor movement from both inside and outside factors with the knowledge this anticommunism often left the United States’ borders and had deep rooted effects that are still present in Labor today.

Slater Mill, located on the Blackstone River, still stands in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. This Mill is famous for being the 1793 birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in the United States. I’ve seen this building countless times and my thoughts on it run the gamut. Mills like Slater, ushered in so much progress but also so much pain. In the struggles of that huge contradiction, workers and their families came together to fight for better lives and were torn apart by the propagandist lies and deceptions, sometimes coming from within, to keep only a handful of mostly white men in power.

John Francis Bray, the American labor activist who also spent time in England as a Chairtist, he said

“If the word had been in use with us a few years since, then every anti-slavery man would have been denounced as a Communist.”* (Footnote: Gutman, “Tompkins Square ‘Riot’”)

As Bray implied, sometimes anticommunism isn’t a direct attack on those who push for or call themselves communists. It houses any anti-labor activity and the attacks on the ideologies under the Socialist umbrella including socialism, anarchism and of course communism.

Many people believe capitalism doesn’t work, however, it works well for the very few,k mainly the top one percent of the population. The system is designed to work in a class system divided into  the “haves and have-nots”, and though there have been reforms put in place to create a middle class, these reforms protected the ones who already accumulated a majority of the wealth and created an even larger inequality between the rich and poor.

Capitalism is the perfect system for the white supremacists that require a class system to gain power by funneling the wealth off what the workers, who they exploit, make. Whereas, socialism is a system that puts the workers, the major majority of the population, in power giving them control of means of production that they create themselves. This does not serve those in power and they will do anything to keep themselves in power and continue to profit from the fruits of the workers’ labor. 

In order to do this, they deploy tactics that including intimidation, manipulation, deception, outright lies, and even murder. They claim it is actually the “insert name of group that is going against the capitalist here” doing these things to them.

The slave owning colonists figured out that they needed to pit the enslaved, poor whites, and the indigenous people against one another so those groups wouldn’t turn on them. They offered concessions to the poor whites and put them in positions of “middle management” like being the overseer of enslaved people in a field or offering awards for them to act as a police force that would be used to hunt down escaped slaves which were considered property for the slave owner of course. This was the base and still very much the mindset of our current police force.

In these series of episodes and articles, we will look at the red scare and all the tactics used by them.

Please read the accompanying

Although, most historians usually use term “The First Red Scare,” referring to the events in following the 1917 Bolshevik revolution where strikes, stoppages and even bombings were blamed on an internal “fifth-column” of Bolsheviks   However, the history of anticommunism in the United States goes back further than that. All the way back to when communism was first defined by Marx in the Communist Manifesto.  

Anti-Communism is more than just a sentiment, it is a series of tactics used by by people in the eternal class conflict.  There are those who want to improve the lives of the workers and those who want to keep the status quo.  Anti-communist tactics are used by those who want to keep status quo. These tactics have been used ever since the first revolts of the oppressed: enslaved people and they have been molded and perfected until today.

In order to do this, they deploy tactics that include intimidation, manipulation, deception, outright lies, and even murder. In order to take on the powerful, the powerless must be united in a strong, indivisible front.  One of the most useful tactics they used is the divide and conquer tactic since the days of the slavery.

The slave owning colonists figured out that they needed to pit the enslaved, poor whites, and the indigenous people against one another so those groups wouldn’t turn on them. They offered concessions to the poor whites and put them in positions of “middle management” like being the overseer of enslaved people in a field or offering awards for them to act as a police force that would be used to hunt down escaped slaves which were considered property for the slave owner of course. This was the base and still very much the mindset of our current police force.  They created whiteness, a merging of pan-european identities, in order to break any solidarity between poor european immigrants and enslaved Africans.  

“Othering” a group or an ethnicity was a common tactic used throughout the labor movement. Throughout the 1800s large groups of immigrants, mainly from Europe, immigrated to the USA.  1848 was a hard year for the people of both Ireland and Germany. Ireland had the ongoing English engineered famine and cultural and religious oppression under the English. In Germany, a revolution of an alliance of liberals, socialist, and the nationalists lost against the conservative rule. Many of the German immigrants that made their way to the US brought with them Marx’s new ideas on socialism.

The media played a big part as well. Newspapers were written through the eyes of the state and capitalists. Socialists were often portrayed negatively in the media, depicted as un-American and a threat to the capitalist system. This portrayal fueled public distrust and hostility toward socialist ideas.

Two years later, in August 1850, during the 1850 Garment Workers Strike in that left two German tailors dead in August of that year, the papers took great umbrage of the “violent Germans” destroying property and wrote of how the police saved the day with the use of their clubs while breaking up the 300 tailors protesting not being paid fairly. Little was said about the two men who died at the end of those clubs.

In this strike alone, we start to see some of the anticommunist tendencies. The media made sure everyone knew these were “German tailors”  and that the Germans were “prone to violence”.   Therefore, the first tactic that is often used is to play upon national and ethnic identities to “other” people involved in strikes as a way of encouraging workers who have much more in common with the strikers to turn away from them.

The Pinkertons

The Pinkertons

At the same time during the Garment Workers strike, in August of 1850, Allan Pinkerton opened up what he called a “detective agency” in Chicago.  The Pinkerton Detective Agency originally started by providing security and investigation from beyond what the “official” sheriff services at that time were willing to do for mainly banks and railroads.   However, after the civil war, they expanded their services to become labor spies and private police for companies who were involved in labor strife against their workers. At the height of their power, between  1870 to the 1890s, they were the world’s largest private police. 

In 1873, Alan Pinkerton took on his role as a spy for capital against labor strife. In 1873, Alan Pinkerton received an urgent communique from Franklin Gowan, who, against the anti-monopolistic practices of the day, owned both the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Reading Railway company and the Reading Coal and Iron company. Franklin Gowan’s task to Pinkerton was to allegedly get rid of the “noxious weeds” infesting the coal region.  

However, the coal region was now being populated by mostly irish workers who had come after they had lost their properties during the 1848 potato famine. Unfortunately, for the Irish laborers, life in Pennsylvania did not turn out much better.  They complained, “In Ireland, there were landlords and agents, in Pennsylvania there were mine owners and mine bosses”  

In order to fight for better conditions, the Irish turned to a secret society known as the Ancient Order of the Hibernians.  In 1863, the Irish laborers went on strike to oppose the new federal draft laws.  They also started to protest for better working conditions, and soon this turned into a riot.  

Many people in Pennsylvania laid blame to a group known as “Molly Macguires.” The Pinkerton Detective Agency’s job was to make a case against these 20 Irish coal miners who had been the source of labor dispute.  For this, he hired an Irishman who had lost his liquor store in the Great Chicago Fire.  His name was James McParland.  

The original Molly McGuires were a group of agrarian workers in Ireland that probably started sometime around 1835. They would protest high rents, low wages, and the English enclosing off the lands for the conacre system. The conacre differed from regular sharecropping because there was no formal lease between the farmer and the landlord. This system, which forced the tenants to grow just one crop, is thought to be one of the biggest reasons for the Potato Famine in Ireland. 

The tactics the Mollies used mostly consisted of damaging the fences that enclosed the land, releasing livestock, threatening, and, yes, beatings and even some assassinations. So labeling a group of laborers “Molly McGuires” was a fear tactic to pin them as violent and made them neat scapegoats for the person or persons who were actually committing the assassinations. 

From 1864 through 1868, 17 coal mine bosses in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania were murdered. These and other murders in the area went unsolved until the mid-1870’s when a Pinkerton labor spy infiltrated and made a case against a group of Irish men many who were past and present labor leaders in the area.  

There is little to no proof that the 20 men executed for the murders that happened in the area at the time actually committed the murders or that they even were associated with the Molly McGuires.

It also should be noted the man who hired the Pinkertons, owner of the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroad, Franklin B. Gowan, was the person who benefitted the most from the murders as he was buying up the coal companies after the assassinations happened. This was done illegally because as president of the Reading Railroad, he was not allowed to own coal mines but Pennsylvania said that was unenforceable. Gowan, who had studied law and served as the District Attorney Schuylkill County in 1862, also served as prosecution on some of the trials of the “Mollies”. 

Be sure to check out part two which will be coming shortly.

Before occupying his newest role as Bangladeshi Juan Guaido, Mohammed Yunus rose to fame in the 1990s, for his Grameen bank, a bank whose purpose was to give micro-loans to poor people. It eventually expanded to create a cottage industry with his Grameen Telecom, Grameen Fisheries, Grameen Danone Food and more!

In his effort to promote the Grameen Bank, Mohammed Yunus has made outrageous claims about his micro-loan program. He once said, “Poverty will be eradicated in a generation. Our children will have to go to a `poverty museum’ to see what all the fuss was about."

Even after 40 years of founding his ‘revolutionary’ institution, Bangladesh remains as poor as ever with 71.4% of the population living on less than $5.50 a day, while 1.3 million children are engaged in child labor. Sadly, people in Bangladesh experience poverty first-hand, and life, itself, is the poverty museum.

However, if we look at articles and literature on the Grameen Bank in the West, it mostly consists of hagiographies and repetition of outlandish claims made by Mohammed Yunus. A cursory examination proves that it is anything but a poverty relief program and the only thing these micro-loans guarantee is that their borrowers will take on more predatory loans.

The theory of micro-lending goes something like this: Give an impoverished, destitute villager 10,000 Takas as a loan. They will use that money to open up a Bhel Puri stand (or something similar), and then, with the income they generate from the Bhel Puri stand, they would not only repay the loan, but they will lift themselves out of poverty using their Bhel Puri straps.

According to the myth constructed by Mohammed Yunus himself, in 1974, he went to a house of a bamboo stool-maker Sofia Begum, in the village of Jobra. She had apparently borrowed money from the local loan sharks to get bamboos at usurious interest rates. She claimed the money lender charged 10% interest per week. After being moved by his experience, he allegedly gave her and another 42 villagers $27 which freed them from this perpetual state of bonded labor1.

Seeing the “success” of his loans, he reasoned that the families were poor, not because they didn't have money (which is the obvious definitional cause of poverty), but they were poor because they did not have access to credit.

From this experience, his life mission was born. He was to ensure that every one would be able to get loans, regardless of how poor they were.

According to the Grameen Bank, this is how, a loan is supposed to operate in theory: If someone wants a loan, they have to form a group of five villagers. The loan is given to the group at 20% interest rate and each of the five members are responsible for the loan collectively.2

For example, if a group of five people borrow 1000 Takas, they will have to repay 20 Takas a week on the principle for fifty weeks. The 200 Takas of interest are due on a lump sum at the end.

The mythology is also combined with an intense propaganda effort. In 2006, in Germany, they staged a play called “Talisma and the Microcredit”:

The play was set in a remote village of Bangladesh, full of poor people and few landlords. Taslima, a poor girl, lived there with her parents. One day, a fully suited and booted World Bank consultant arrived with a “development” project to rescue the poor and make the village developed. After some time the World Bank project, as usual, created havoc—bringing more distress for the poor, more money for the rich, and intensifying natural disaster. The increasing floods and river erosion made Taslima’s family lose everything. At this point a miracle happened: Grameen SOS arrived. The poor villagers received information about microcredit, the way to prosperity and empowerment! Taslima and others formed a group to get microcredit, but since they only had four members, they needed one more to form a group eligible for a loan. In the meantime, the World Bank consultant realized his disastrous role, and after desperately looking for Taslima to begin a new life, he joined her, leaving his suited and booted world behind. They became five, allowing them to form a group to enter the microcredit world, and they lived happily ever after!

While in theory, it sounds like a great idea. People who are living on the edges of poverty can get over their problems by simply opening up a Bhel Puri stand in their villages, reality of these loans are a complete different matter.

A Danish documentary filmmaker went back to Jobra after the publication of the book and visit by none other than Hillary Clinton. In that village, 60 families took loans from the Grameen bank to build houses. Only 3 families succeeded and one of the families that did succeed had to sell their house because their daughter became ill and they needed money to pay for her appendix operation. Also, Sofia Begum, the woman whose situation started all this, died in abject poverty in 1998.

Despite, occasional success stories, the structure of the loans make it nearly impossible to do what the Grameen Bank claims it wants to help villagers do: start businesses. One week after they receive the loan, the villagers have to make their first repayment. Most people are not even able to get their businesses up and running within a week, let alone, generate enough cash to make repayments on these loans. When interviewing villagers, many repeated the same story. They had to take up other loans in order to make their weekly repayments.

Mallika, a villager from Jobra explained the problems with the weekly repayments. She said, “I bought land with the money. But, then I found that I couldn’t earn that much money. I had spent the money. So I had to take a new loan to repay the old one.” Another villager Yasmeen said that the weekly payments forced her to take other loan. Eventually, she was indebted to five organizations. Other women who took loans, had to return to their local loan sharks in order to keep up with the weekly payments.

The group payments of these loans puts intense pressure on the borrowers to make their weekly payments because if one member of the group defaults, the other group members, who are in an equally precarious position, have to cover the defaulters loans. Therefore, the social pressure forces borrowers to use any means necessary, even local loan sharks, to find the necessary money to make these repayments, defeating the purpose of the Grameen Bank. Since the Grameen Bank was created to help borrowers not use usurious loan sharks.

This is no wonder, according to research done by QK Ahmed, 1189 of 2501 borrowers surveyed could not repay their loans on time. 72.3% of them had to take out other loans to make their payments. 10% had to sell assets that gave them productivity, like goats, in order to make their repayment. Another study sampled 1489 families from 15 villages. Only, 5-9% of the borrowers said they were better off after using micro-credit.

On top of the failures in helping their borrowers, Grameen Bank has also had serious issues with its corporate governance. Mohammed Yunus, the founder has been at the center of many scandals at the heart of his Grameen institutions, which forced him to resign in 2011. When Grameen Bank lost its tax exempt status, in 1998, he moved $100 million to another shell organization called Grameen Kalyan, and then loaned that money from Grameen Kalyan to Grameen Bank, in order to avoid paying taxes. His Grameen Yogurt business was found using adulterated milk in 2011.

Shortly before occupying his position as chief of Bangladesh, Mohammed Yunus was convicted of violating Bangladeshi labor laws with his other subsidiary Grameen Telecom. Bangladeshi law requires a company to pay five percent of its net profit to a welfare fund that could later be used for pensions. It seems that Grameen Telecom, in its haste to make profits, failed to create such a fund.

Despite, being disgraced and scandal plagued, he continued to be the object of praise and adulation in the West. He has been praised by the likes of Larry Summers and Bill Clinton simply because the Grameen Bank model perfectly fits in with the neoliberal consensus that the West hopes to impose upon the world.

Poverty in the third world is caused by underdevelopment and lack of societal infrastructure. Alleviating this poverty, which has been done successfully in China and Vietnam (to name a few), requires massive government intervention and government programs to change the situation. People in villages in Bangladesh are poor because there are no places for the masses to find decent paying jobs. That requires government investment to set up large scale industries that can employ thousands of semi-skilled workers to give them decent wages. In order to set up these industries, there needs to be large scale infrastructure investments in public roads and trains that will allow these goods to be moved efficiently.

The government also needs to invest in high-quality public schools to create a more skilled labor force for the next generation. On top of it, there needs to be social programs in healthcare and retirement such that one medical emergency doesn't force a villager to sell her house.

But, since the 1970s, the Washington consensus managed by the dual institutions of the IMF and World Bank have been forcing third world countries, including Bangladesh to do the opposite. Since its independence, Bangladesh has been forced to:

[Dismantle big public enterprises.] Large mills were replaced by export processing zones, shopping malls, and real estate.

Export-oriented garment factories became the mainstay of manufacturing. Incidents like the Rana Plaza collapse in April 2013 showed the extent of cruelty and greed in these death traps.

Permanent jobs in factories were replaced by a system of temporary, part-time, outsourced, and insecure work.

The biggest source of foreign exchange has been remittances; existing side by side with a huge outflow of resources through the transfer pricing and profit outflow by foreign companies, and transfer of accumulated wealth by local business groups, legally and illegally.

The number of workers abroad is now more than the number of workers working in the country’s factories, who took this risky option because of job scarcity.

The feminization of the working class is another recent phenomenon, which happened because of a reduction of purchasing power and increase of job insecurity.

That has kept pressure on the families to work longer and to join the workforce with more than one family member, including children.

Energy resources and power have been systematically privatized. Power became a costly commodity and costs for the productive sector have increased, while energy security for the majority was threatened. All of this hurt the peasants; many had to join the labor market at home and abroad.

Land grabbing, occupying public spaces by private business, and deforestation have uprooted many. Rural branches of state-owned banks have closed down, squeezing the access to cheaper finance for rural people, and forcing them to go to microcredit, which has higher interest rates.

However, the philosophy of neoliberalism requires the government to keep a hands-off approach on all the infrastructure projects and social programs required for mass poverty eradication. The Grameen philosophy perfectly dovetails into the dastardly Washington Consensus. If poor people can be given enough loans and high interest rates, they can remove themselves from poverty. Anyone who fails this uphill battle, is at fault for not working hard enough to pull themselves up from their bootstraps.

As the new leader of Bangladesh, given his philosophy and closeness to the neoliberal institutions, it is unlikely that he will involve Bangladesh in large-scale projects with the Belt and Road initiative, which has been instrumental in developing much needed infrastructure in the most underdeveloped areas of the world. Instead, he is likely to follow Bangladesh into bigger and bigger macro-debt traps created by IMF and World Bank.

He will sweet talk on the importance of social responsibility while allowing big manufacturers to set up less than safe garment factories in Bangladesh, such as the one that collapsed in 2013. Most importantly, he will allow status quo to continue. This will allow him to be praised in the West as the new face of democracy in Bangladesh, regardless of the situation of the people within.

Classical music was seen as a European creation. Hollywood still had not perfected its blockbusters. The American authors who were known abroad such as Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck had socialist leanings, which would not be of any help for the US government officials who were trying to sell American capitalism abroad.

In the effort to win influence over the world, the US has two big problems: their actions around the world made it clear that the US wanted to replace former colonial powers, second, the racial discrimination in the US made it difficult to win influence in countries populated mainly by people of color.

Their efforts to win influence amongst people of color was severely hampered by the overt racial discrimination that black people faced in the USA. They could not convince African heads of state that they envisioned a partnership on equal footing, when most black people were oppressed at home through overt racial segregation and the more insidious economic discrimination.

In Western Europe, the traditional leftist artists, in their expressions, used art for politics, which often highlighted the crimes of colonialism. For example, Pablo Picasso, who was a Marxist, used his art for political messages. One example is his painting “Massacre in Korea” which highlighted the atrocities committed by the US in the Korean war.

A conversation on the grounds of colonial crimes, was one that the US could now win. Therefore, the US strategy was to change the conversation. This problem was tackled by two agencies: the United States Information Agency, which was created in 1953, and operated under the state department and within US embassies. The CIA also took to sponsoring many umbrella organizations aimed at this effort.

They focused on art forms that removed political messages from the traditional leftist art. One of the art forms that they chose to sponsor was modern art, whose abstract expressions steered the conversation about the boundaries and definitions of what is actually art and it steered the conversation away from political commentary. In fact, the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) was filled with national security ties.

MOMA was founded in 1929 by Abby Rockefeller. In 1939, her son Nelson Rockefeller became the President of MOMA. He was also appointed by the Roosevelt administration to serve as the Assistant Secretary of State in Latin America. Its executive secretary between 1948-1949, Thomas Braden went on later to join the CIA. In a Saturday Evening Post article entitled, “I’m glad the CIA Immoral”, he wrote that modern art “won more acclaim for the U.S. …than John Foster Dulles or Dwight D. Eisenhower could have bought with a hundred speeches.”

Under the secret patronage of the CIA, MOMA arranged many art exhibits all throughout the world. In fact, the State Department in 1946 spent thousands top purchase modern art pieces featuring artists like Georgia O’Keeffe and Jackson Pollack.

In the field of literature, the United States Government sponsored many magazines around the world such as London-based Encounter and the French-language Preuves. They featured writers who strived away from critiquing concrete actions of the United States to celebrating more abstract notions like “freedom” and “democracy.” This helped create what later CIA employee Cord Meyer described as a “compatible left.”

The field of music was used to combat the most heavy criticisms levied against the US, namely the brutal racial oppression faced by Black Americans. The US had an uphill battle of convincing many newly freed African nations that it was interested in being an equal partner, when Black Americans faced overt segregation and more insidious forms of economic discrimination within the USA. Their answer to this was to promote Jazz music. In one embarrassing incident, two Ghanian Diplomats faced discrimination inside a Denny’s in Delaware, which prompted the Eisenhower administration to desegregate a stretch of highway between New York and Washington, which diplomats frequently travelled between.

Unlike classical music, Jazz music could be touted as a uniquely American form of expression. It started in New Orleans, mainly from Black Americans, who would use a mix of rhythms and fast-paced improvisation. With predominant artists being mainly Black Americans, they could showcase them on a world stage, which would alleviate the charges of the US engaging in active racial discrimination.

Under these guises, the State Department arranged for “Jazz Diplomacy” tours around the world. They sponsored artists such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong to tour around Africa. Of course, being sponsored by the State Department did soften the harsh critics both of these artists had about the racism at home.

In 1954, after the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs Board of Education that segregation, was inherently unequal, the instructed the states to proceed to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” But of course, most states did the opposite and tried to hinder any efforts at integration at every step. In 1957, when then Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to surround the Central High School, to prevent the nine students from enrolling in the school, Louis Armstrong’s critique was harsh and unwavering. He said, “The way they're treating my people in the south … the government can go to hell."

However, after accepting his position as a Jazz Ambassador in 1960, when asked about the race relations within the US, his reply was, “I don’t know anything about it; I’m just a trumpet player.”

On top of muting the critics of these once strong musicians, the Jazz tours did not only promote diplomacy, but they helped aid the efforts of the US National Security State, in other ways, unbeknownst to these musicians.

On June 30, 1960, Congo had just earned its independence from Belgium after one of the most brutal colonial rules. Joseph Conrad, in his book, “The Heart of Darkness” wrote about the depths of humanity’s depravity which took place in King Leopold’s Congo. King Leopold desperately wanted a colony, and nations such as the United States and the United Kingdom obliged in the Berlin conference by establishing the Congo Free State. Unlike other colonies, the Congo Free State did not belong to the country of Belgium, but instead of King Leopold’s personal fiefdom. With the patenting of rubber tires by John Dunlap in 1888, demand for a new resource skyrocketed exponentially. Congo, being rich in rubber trees was lucrative for the profit for the profiteers.

In order to meet the exorbitant demand for rubber, the Congolese people were forced to harvest wild rubber through daily quotas which was enforced through the vicious Force Publique, King Leopold’s personal mercenary force. Failure to meet the rubber quota meant that the Force Publique would chop off the hands of the Congolese villagers as one of the most brutal forms of retribution.

Later, in part due to the atrocities in Congo under King Leopold, in 1908, Belgium took over the management of Congo as Belgian Congo. Around this time, Congo’s rich deposits of copper became known, which led to the opening of the mining concession Union Minere, which exploited the rich copper deposits in the province of Katanga.

While Belgians exploited the minerals in the tune of billions of dollars, Congolese were left with very little to show for it. Besides the mineral-rich region of Katanga, there were not many highways joining the country together. Schools were few and far between and mostly serviced Belgian pupils. The Belgian colonization in Congo was so brutal that in 1960 when Belgian finally left Congo, the average life expectancy was 40.2 years. Diseases were rampant.

Amidst this backdrop, a young, visionary Patrice Lumumba was elected the first Prime Minister of an independent Congo, which became independent on June 30, 1960. During the independence day processions, Belgium King Baudouin took the stage, where he praised the King Leopold II. He also stated that he hoped the Congolese would prove worthy of the “trust” placed in them by the Belgian colonial powers. Soon afterwards, Patrice Lumumba took up the stage with a fiery speech that highlighted the brutalities of Belgian rule in Congo. He said, “We remember the ridicule, insults, and beatings we had to endure morning, noon and night, because we were ‘negroes’. We recollect the atrocious suffering of those persecuted for political opinions or religious beliefs. Exiled in their own homeland, their fate was really worse than death itself,” he said, recalling that this independence was indeed the fruit of a “struggle.”

Lumumba also expressed desire to use the vast mineral wealth in Congo in order to develop it economically. Immediately, this speech painted a target on his back where Washington and Brussels were concerned. On August 18, 1960, the CIA head Allen Dulles met with Eisenhower in order to plan the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba. Soon, the main plans were made, which involved supporting Joseph Mobutu and his militia to take over the country.

When Louis Armstrong began his tour in Congo in October, Lumumba was already under house-arrest. His tour was promoted in a west, as a way of distracting western audiences from the actual goings on in Congo. The first stop was Leopoldville (Kinshasa) where he played to a large crowd. The more curious aspect of his tour was the second stop: Elizabethville, which was what the capital of the mineral-rich province of Katanga was called.

While the US, formally, did publicly recognize Katanga as an independent republic, they provided the rebels with military support through back channels. The US had established a covert action program. Through, their allies in Apartheid South Africa, they created channels to recruit both mercenaries and also send arms to the rebel group.

While under the pretext of attending a Louis Armstrong concert, the CIA attache Larry Devlin, who was under the cover of being an embassy staffer was able to move freely in Katanga. Embassy staffers also met with the self-declared President in Katanga, without the US giving actual recognition. Ambassador Clare Timberlake went for the event, as well as the CIA chief Devlin. It was later admitted that ‘The object was to talk to Tshombe, the elected president of the Congolese province of Katanga, without recognizing him as the president of an independent state.’

While the concert itself did not enable the coup, it allowed for key meetings between coup-plotters and embassy staff to occur. It gave them the necessary cover to have these meetings without drawing attention to the planning of the coup. A few months after the concert, the Democratically elected leader Patrice Lumumba was assassinated. Of course, even without Louis Armstrong’s Jazz concerts in Congo, the CIA would probably have found a way to meet with key figures that enabled them to create an armed resistance to install the western-friendly Joseph Mubuto into power.

The mineral wealth of Congo remained in the hands of western companies like Union minere.

While the Jazz diplomacy ended in the 1990s, the State Department continues to sponsor similar programs in the interests of its national security state. Nowadays, much of the function of the CIA has been taken over by the National Endowment for Democracy, who continue to give grants to various artists and radio programs.

The US State Department and the US national Security state continues to use music and art to promote its agenda. Most recently, it named Rapper Chuck D, as the Global Ambassador for Rap, and we interviewed him about his transition from “Fighting the system” to “Representing the system.” In his interview with us, he tried to explain that “the devil does not use the same trick twice” and he is not being used in a similar manner as Luis Armstrong and other musicians from the past. But, only time will tell if that is indeed the case.

Like with the endorsements of other neocons like Dick Cheney, the Democratic party have wholeheartedly embraced these endorsements. Vice President Harris could have said something like, “I am glad these former Republicans are not voting for Trump, but given their own record and our fundamental policy differences, we would reject the endorsements”. Instead, she has repeatedly touted it with pride.

The embracement of these endorsements betray that the Harris campaign and the broader Democratic party have forgotten who Ronald Reagan was as a President. Ronald Reagan was the original prototype which gave birth to his successors like Donald Trump.

Both Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan heavily appealed to racist sentiments in their campaigns. On August 3, 1980, then-candidate Ronald Reagan addressed a large crowd in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where he gave a speech on states' rights. The fairgrounds where Reagan spoke were not far from the site where three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman—were brutally murdered by members of the local Ku Klux Klan in 1964. At this rally, he proclaimed:

I believe that there are programs like that, programs like education and others, that should be turned back to the states and the local communities with the tax sources to fund them, and let the people [applause drowns out end of statement]. I believe in states' rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we've distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I'm looking for, I'm going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.

States’ rights was a long used rhetoric among segregationists to show their opposition to any programs for broader equality. Ronald Reagan’s dog-whistle was a signal to the very racists he intended to court for his election bid. He signaled his intention to turn his back on social programs that helped reduce racial inequality throughout the 1960s and 1970s. One Washington Post columnist explained the significance of the speech, “ It was bitter symbolism for black Americans (though surely not just for black Americans). Countless observers have noted that Reagan took the Republican Party from virtual irrelevance to the ascendancy it now enjoys. The essence of that transformation, we shouldn't forget, is the party's successful wooing of the race-exploiting Southern Democrats formerly known as Dixiecrats. And Reagan's Philadelphia appearance was an important bouquet in that courtship.” Given these dog-whistles, it is no surprise that the KKK endorsed Ronald Reagan for both is 1980 campaign and 1984 campaign, which he repudiated.

Where Ronald Reagan employed dog whistles, Donald Trump’s preferred instrument is the trumpet. He, too, began his campaign through racist demonization of Mexican immigrants. He implied that immigrants beget crime. But both heavily leveraged the sentiments of racists in order to win votes.

In addition to trumpeting his intentions to racists, Donald Trump has repeatedly shown sympathies to Neo-Nazis. He most obvious example is his refusal to condemn the neo-Nazis who were marching in Charlottesville. He said that “both sides were to blame.” Ronald Reagan used the same “both sides” logic, but with the original Nazis. In 1985, he visited a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, where former SS members were buried. He went on to lay a wreath in the cemetery and also implied that members of the Wehrmacht were innocent members, instead of active participants in some of the worst atrocities known to man. He said, “ There are over 2,000 buried in Bitburg cemetery. Among them are 48 members of the SS -- the crimes of the SS must rank among the most heinous in human history -- but others buried there were simply soldiers in the German Army. How many were fanatical followers of a dictator and willfully carried out his cruel orders? And how many were conscripts, forced into service during the death throes of the Nazi war machine? We do not know. Many, however, we know from the dates on their tombstones, were only teenagers at the time. There is one boy buried there who died a week before his 16th birthday.”

Bitburg was not the only time when Ronald Reagan praised Nazis and Nazi collaborators. In 1983, Ronald Reagan lauded OUN member Yaroslav Stetsko as the "last premier of a free Ukrainian State”

Most recently, in the previous debate, Donald Trump demonized Haitian immigrants with the preposterous claim that these immigrants steal and eat people’s cats. Ronald Reagan demonized black people with similar baseless and racist claims. In 1976, he spouted an anecdote about an alleged “welfare queen” who lived like a queen through welfare benefits she received by using multiple identities.

Policy-wise, Donald Trump merely continued with Ronald Reagan started. Ronald Reagan pioneered the biggest tax cuts for the wealthy. Under Ronald Reagan, the top marginal income rate had their taxes cut in half, which started a trajectory of the extreme income inequality that we see today. While the top 10% of the earners received unprecedented tax cuts, the poorest in society saw their welfare benefits severely cut, which worsened poverty. Donald Trump continued the Reaganite tradition of benefitting the wealthy with his unprecedented tax cuts during his tenure as President.

Both Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan failed to deal with epidemics under their presidency. Donald Trump had to deal with the covid-19 epidemic, while Ronald Reagan had to wrestle with the AIDS epidemic. According to a Lancet study, 40% of the Covid-19 deaths that occurred could have been prevented with better management. Ronald Reagan’s handling of the AIDS epidemic, he decided that it was divine retribution for people who engaged in immoral lifestyles. His press secretary called it a “gay plague” and cruelly laughed about the people who were withering away from AIDS.

Foreign policy-wise, while Donald Trump enacted a right-wing coup in Bolivia, and attempted regime change in various countries, in line with Reaganite policy. However, nothing Donald Trump did could compare to the damage done by Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan supported Efram Rios Montt’s war against the indigenous population of Guatemala, which resulted in a genocide, where over 600 villages were exterminated including Dos Erres. He supported the Contras, who committed crimes were breathtakingly graphic and evil that Ronald Reagan ended up facing opposition domestically in his support. One of his most famous vetoes is when he vetoed an anti-apartheid bill, calling it an “economic warfare” giving US the embarrassing status of being the last supporter of apartheid South Africa in the world stage.

Of course, we are only discussing Ronald Reagan era Republicans. Kamala Harris has also welcomed the endorsements of other neocons such as Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney, who has a 90% Trump voting score from her time in Congress.

This is not the first time that the Democratic Party has embraced neocons and former Republicans. In 2016, Hillary Clinton also touted endorsements of various former Republicans. The reason for this is simple. The Democratic Party has two opposing interests: donors and voters. For the wealthy donors, Republican-lite policies preserves their status quo and it is comfortable. They can choose someone who will not rock the boat, while maintaining a respectable presence on the world stage. For the Democratic Party, embracing moderate Republicans allows them to tack right without having to fulfill the expectations of progressives who may demand more economically populist policies such as Medicare for All and universal education.

For the anti-Trump Republicans, they can endorse a more respectable candidate without having to abandon their policies and philosophies that have guided them for the past 40 or so years. In this end, the marriage between “anti-Trump” Republicans and Democrats is a happy one for the elites. But, what does it say about a party whose tent is so big that they do not exclude people who were responsible for some of the most damaging policies in the past 50 years?

This election cycle, far too many people talked about how voting for Hindenburg would have stopped Hitler, including columnists for the Washington Post. However, through his ideology and actions, Hindenburg paved the way for Hitler to become the leader of Germany. Therefore, we decided that it was important to debunk this myth once in for all.

Therefore, we present to you, part 2 of our documentary series: Myths about the Nazis

Part 1:

We went through 8 years of the Obama Presidency, where the Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority for a while, 4 years of the Trump Presidency, and 3.5 years of the Biden Presidency without a raise to the federal minimum wage, which has led to an effective decrease in minimum wage. To understand the “decrease” in minimum wage, we need to examine the historical forces that led to its creation and identify what is missing.

The fight for minimum wage has not been a linear fight. There have been victories and setbacks. In 1912, after a massive strike by women textile workers in Massachusetts, the first minimum wage law was created. Back then, while the cost of living was $10 per week, women’s wages were much lower. Many people were concerned that women would be forced into prostitution or other vices. In response, the Massachusetts state legislature created a panel that allowed employees to complain, if their wages did not rise to the cost of living. Although, no minimum wage was set, employers who violated the provisions had their names published in the local newspaper.

Inspired by this first set of victories, other labor movements began to follow suit. Following a series of strikes that paralyzed the nation in 1913, set up actual minimum wage laws. In 1913, Oregon did so at the state legislature. They said,“the State of Oregon requires that women and minors should be protected from conditions of labor which have a pernicious effect on their health and morals, and inadequate wages and unduly long hours and unsanitary conditions of labor have such a pernicious effect.” They set the minimum wage for $8.25 per week for women and $6 per week for girls under 18 (child labor was still allowed back then). Men and boys were excluded from the Oregon’s minimum wage laws, because many male jobs were unionized and the state legislature did not have the same concern that men would be forced into prostitution.

However, these brief victories in minimum wage was knocked down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. In 1923, in Adkins vs Children's Hospital, the Supreme Court ruled that these were unconstitutional because it violated the employers’ and employees’ rights for freedom of contract under the fifth amendment.

This was a long series of reactionary rulings set by the Supreme Court, that seems to do nothing but wage a class war against the working class that continues till today.

In 1929, the Great Depression began. As millions of people became destitute and unemployment, the movement for collective bargaining also grew. In 1932, there were a series of strikes that not only fought for minimum wage, but against lowering of wages. In 1933, Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) which set the first federal minimum wage law. Once again, the Supreme Court put its thumb against workers in another reactionary ruling and ruled that this was an “unconstitutional delegation of legislative power” in A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. et al v. United States.

After a series of battles, The Fair Labor Standards act of 1938 was passed. It set the minimum wage at $0.25 per hour and a 44 hour work week. It outlawed child labor, but it was limited to employers who engaged in interstate commerce. The FLSA also had many exemptions that excluded agricultural and domestic workers. This meant that while white workers saw their wages increase, black workers who disproportionately made up excluded workers did not see their wages increase.

It was not until 1966, when a new amendment was passed to the FLSA, which included a separate minimum wage for farm workers for the first time. But, even with the unequal distribution of wealth, the minimum wage continued to increase during the cold war. US had an incentive to show that “gentle capitalism” could provide for the workers at home, while trying to wrest control of colonies abroad for exploitation. At this time, the middle class lifestyle was afforded to many workers and the minimum wage was on pace to keep with the cost of living.

Unfortunately, after the Cold War, the US government had no incentive to do by its workers. They had already captured all the colonies abroad. Instead of workers benefiting, the benefits went to the wealthy when both parties adopted neoliberalism.

Unlike in the 1930s, where unions were strong and the worker’s movement was powerful, the workers of today are powerless. On top of that, with the introduction of the gig economy, workers are more isolated than ever. Since 1983, the share of unionism has fallen. Now, under 10% of the workers belong to a union. Without the collective bargaining power, the Federal minimum wage is unlikely to increase regardless of which administration makes it to the White House.

While the struggle continues, in order to achieve success, people need to be engaging in more direct action and also attempt to revive the union movement. Until then, the situation of wages seems bleak for the American worker.

This week, we sat down with Chuck D and asked to explain himself, whether he believes he, too, will be used in this way and why he decided to accept this position.

As Haiti faces yet another crisis and meddling in the form of UN-peace keeping troops led by Kenya,they are given full support by the traditional imperial powers: USA and France. In fact, in early June, French President Emmanuel Macron met with Kenyan President William Ruto. In the meeting, the French President affirmed his support for the "Kenyan-led" "peacekeeping" mission to Haiti in order to quell the unrest.

Haiti’s major problems are lack of infrastructure, extreme poverty, food insecurity and extreme wealth disparity. None of which, a violent crackdown by one of the world’s most corrupt police forces would fix.

Earlier this year, we interviewed documentary filmmaker Kim Ives about the situation in Haiti. He says that the US media is completely misrepresenting the entire situation.

Watch the interview here:

Because of heavy foreign influence and neoliberalism, Haiti has been put into the debt trap. Severe austerity has caused the state apparatus to not function. Many citizens have banded together in neighborhood associations as a form of self-help.

Kim Ives said, “the narrative about the gang violence in Haiti is an imperialist narrative to demonize and criminalize any resistance…many of the “gangs” are mislabeled. “

Kim Ives continued, “ [they] are fundamentally neighborhood committees [that originated] with the debilitation of the state due to neoliberal reforms that began in earnest in 1986… The neighborhood committees became, in fact, the State in many neighborhoods of the city [capital Port-au-Prince], especially as it began to mushroom as peasants were driven off the land by these same neoliberal reforms.”

In other words, Haiti's main problems stem from imperial interference and colonial theft, the same problems they have had since their inception. France played a historical role as the biggest beneficiary of the looting of Haiti. Instead of supporting a violent invasion to install a leader chosen by Western powers in a secret backroom without the input of a single Haitian, perhaps the best way to improve the situation in Haiti is to pay restitution for their most significant ill-gotten gains.

Haiti, known as Saint Dominigue, back then, began its life as one of the most lucrative colonies for France. The island produced half of all the coffee in the world and 40% of the world's sugar in the 1790s. The labor required to get process sugar and coffee is intensive and grueling. In order to fulfill these requirements, France shipped 40,000 slaves through the grueling middle passage, which was the voyage between Africa to the Americas for enslaved people. Because of the cramped conditions, and lack of nutrition, 15% of the enslaved people died during the middle passage.

Saint Dominigue was the primary destination for many of these people. During the late 1700s, one third of all the people transported on the middle passage ended up in Saint Dominique.

The conditions were brutal. Abuse was routine. Often the most minor transgressions resulted in severe beatings. Women were subjected to sexual abuse. Working conditions were long, under unwavering heat. The food was limited, as well as access to clean water. The living conditions were cramped, which made the island ripe for epidemics. Consequently The average life expectancy for an enslaved person on the island of Saint Dominique was only 21.

The trade from Saint Dominique was very profitable for France. The yearly profits from the enslaved labor reached more than 150 Livres on average.

Inspired by the activities of the French Revolution, and also looking to get out of the miserable conditions on the Plantations, in 1792, led by Touissant L’Overture, the slaves took up arms and formed a rebellion.

Fighting this rebellion was not easy, as the tiny island had to fight four colonial powers at once:English, French, Spain and the USA. After amazing maneuvers, and nearly 12 years of fighting , Saint Dominique finally achieved independence.

On January 1, 1804, Jean Jacques Dessalines declared the island known as "Santo Domingo" independent. The name was changed to Haiti, which means "Island of the high mountains" in the local indigenous languages. Despite losing official control of the Island in 1804, France would continue to claim the island as part of its own until 1825.

Sadly, the 12 years of war ravaged the countryside, and limited Haiti's ability to produce their lucrative cash crops. This was not the end to their troubles.

On July 3,1825, France sent 14 ships armed with 528 cannons to the harbor in Port-au-prince and threatened the island with complete military annihilation. France demanded Haiti pay 150 million Francs in reparations to the slaveowners who had ”lost their property” to the Haitian rebellion. Haiti reluctantly submitted to the demand and France officially recognized Haiti as an independent country.

To understand the scale of this debt, the average revenue that Haiti received from its main exports between 1818-1824 was 2,581,210 francs. Therefore, 150 million francs represented 58 years of revenue at 100% going to France.1

According to Edward Galeano:

“In 1804, they inherited a land ravaged by the devastating sugar cane plantations and a country ravaged by a ferocious war. They inherited “the French Debt”. France resented deeply the humiliation inflicted on Napoleon Bonaparte. Soon after its birth, Haiti had to agree to deliver huge Gal reparations, through which they were forced to pay for their own liberation. That atonement for the sin of freedom would cost 150 million gold francs. The new country was born strangled by this rope tied to its neck: a fortune that is equal to Haiti paid French slaveholders and their descendants the equivalent of between $20 and $30 billion in today's dollars. It took Haiti 122 years to pay it off. Professor Marlene Daut writes it "severely damaged the newly independent country's ability to prosper." in today’s currency, or 44 times the total budget of Haiti today. It took far longer than a century to repay the debt and the hefty interests. In 1938 the final debt was paid. By then Haiti belonged to the US banks” (Eduardo Galeano, La Maldición Blanca, 2004).

To understand how much the French debt to Haiti impoverished Haiti, in the paper The Odious Debt, the scholars imagine the existence of a sovereign wealth fund where Haiti would deposit the debt it owed to France. These scholars look at different instruments that Haiti could have invested this money into and the rate of return. The lowest end of the estimates is based on the assumption that Haiti would have invested the sovereign wealth fund in purely gold reserves, and the sovereign fund would be equivalent to $1.6 billion, or 12% of Haiti’s GDP. A middle-of-the-road estimate would be to assume that the real rate of return would be 1% which would yield 2.9 billion. This middle figure would increase the GDP per capita of Haiti to $8100, significantly improving the lives of the impoverished Haitians.

Over the years, many people have called upon France to repay the “greatest heist of all time” back to Haiti. Each time it has been met with derision and eye-rolls from the French leadership.

Instead, of supporting a peacekeeping mission which will create more violence in Haiti, if France really wanted to help bring stability, paying back their ill-begotten wealth to Haiti maybe the best way to ensure stability.