now I have baratrauma
emizeko
joined 5 years ago
Is Li Hongzhi a CIA Agent? Tracing the Funding Trail Through the Friends of Falun Gong
In 2000, Mark Palmer, one of the National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED’s) founders and Vice Chairman of Freedom House—an organization funded entirely by the U.S. Congress—founded a new government-supported group, Friends of Falun Gong (FoFG). By perusing FoFG’s annual tax filings, one discovers that FoFG has contributed funds to Sounds of Hope Radio, New Tang Dynasty TV, and the Epoch Times—all Falun Gong media outlets. FoFG has also contributed to Dragon Springs (a Falun Gong ‘compound’ that hosts a Falun Gong school and a residency complex) and to Shen Yun (a Falun Gong performance company), as well as to Falun Gong’s PR arm. In order to contextualize the U.S. government’s funding of Falun Gong, it will also be helpful to examine a handful of additional U.S. agency activities, such as the NED’s funding of Liu Xiaobo, the Hong Kong protests, and other China-related and Tibet-related groups.
There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.
Prison is when a man is behind bars and the things of life are outside. But there is another kind of prison, where the things are behind bars and the man is outside.
Citations Needed Ep 25: The Banality of CIA-Curated Definitions of ‘Democracy’
Few words elicit such warm feelings as the term "Democracy." Wars are supposedly fought for it, foreign policies are built around it, protecting and advancing it is considered the United States' highest moral order.
Democracy's alleged opposite - broadly called "authoritarianism," "autocracy" or "tyranny” - is cast as the ultimate evil. The stifling, oppressive boot of the state that curtails liberties and must be fought at all costs. This is the world in which we operate and the one where the United States and its satellite media and NGO allies fight to preserve and defend democracy.
So how is "democracy" defined and how are those definitions used to justify American exceptionalism? Where do positive and negative rights come into play, and how do societal choices like illiteracy, poverty, and hunger factor into our notions of freedom?
On today's episode, we discuss the limits of democracy rankings, the oft-cited "Polity IV" metric devised by the CIA-funded Center for Systemic Peace, and more with guest George Ciccariello-Maher.
Episode transcript here: medium.com/@CitationsPodcst/ep…ocracy-aa183c697ccc
It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.
Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.
—Georgian philosopher Ioseb dzе Jugashvili
The concept of "totalitarianism" was popularized by Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951 right at the start of the heated phase of the Cold War.
Inside it, you can see her contradict herself within the bounds of her own concepts, but the main issue is: it attempted to create a false parallel between what she calls "Stalinism" (supposedly the ideology of the Soviet Union at the time) and Nazism, as if they're two sides of the same coin. When, of course, they aren't. This is what we call "making up a concept, pointing to two things in the world, and saying those are the same."
The book also says that totalitarianism is novel in that it attempts to terrorise whole populations instead of only political adversaries, so as to whip the people into shape, when in material terms, we know that isn't what happened in the Soviet Union, and neither in Nazi Germany honestly.
Supposedly, totalitarian movements would attempt to control every single aspect of the life of their subject, and this would be why Hitler and Stalin were totalitarians and Mussolini isn't, because Mussolini would 'just be an autocrat' who wants to subjugate their political opposition.
Many people would mention that she forgets a spooky thing called slavery, that did the same thing. Capitalism could be argued to do it too, colonialism also, etc.
All that aside, a lot of people criticised her for just not understanding certain events correctly. For instance, she mentions that the Nazis weren't really interested in murdering all Jews; instead, those were simply a convenient proxy— a 2-minute hate, if you will— to whip up your population. Therefore it'd be comparable to any famine from the USSR, since intent would be similar, according to her. This fundamentally misunderstands the Nazi project in a futile attempt to draw a line between two different things for political purposes, and ignores historical documentation of intent like the Wannsee conference and Generalplan Ost.
Bottom line: Hannah Arendt created Cold War propaganda to try and equate the old enemy (Nazi Germany) with the new one that was finding itself in the Korean War (Soviet Union). Liberals gobbled this up because they're scared of big words like "authoritarianism", and therefore she had a ton of success. Her theories ignore the political violence of the state and of capitalism because, in her liberal mindset, these weren't actual violence, but instead just the way the world works. This flies in the face of everything the Third World ever tries to accomplish, because our revolutionary violence wouldn't be justified.
It's almost like a "big-tent" propaganda, you can take a million conclusions out of this, and it's been deeply influential.
As a final note, Hannah Arendt was extremely racist in defense of colonialism.
credit to u/Logan_Maddox
Frederick Douglass, arguing for unity among black and white laborers in 1883, said that “experience teaches us that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.”
The critique of wage slavery was then taken up by anarchists, socialists, and labor radicals of various stripes, who railed against the capitalist labor market and organized for a multiracial struggle against the owners of capital. Lucy Parsons, born a slave and later a widely known anarchist, declared in one of her most famous speeches:
How many of the wage class, as a class, are there who can avoid obeying the commands of the master (employing) class, as a class? Not many, are there? Then are you not slaves to the money power as much as were the black slaves to the Southern slaveholders? Then we ask you again: What are you going to do about it? You had the ballot then. Could you have voted away black slavery? You know you could not because the slaveholders would not hear of such a thing for the same reason you can’t vote yourselves out of wage-slavery.
from https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/01/wage-slavery-bernie-sanders-labor
I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953-56, p. 372
under the dictatorship of capital, elections are an individualist consumer ritual that allows liberals to assuage guilt over their complicity and diverts energy away from collective action
How has China maintained their revolution as opposed to the Soviet Union?
Fact is, taking a poor country and nearly fully centralizing the whole thing in a short period of time is incredibly disconnected from Marxian theory. You could argue it was necessary under Stalin to prepare for the war with Germany, but it inevitably meant that post-Stalin there would need to be a period of de-centralization to bring the country back in line with the amount of centralization its level of productive forces could actually support, and then they could begin to centralize again gradually after the fact as Marxian theory actually predicts.
The problem, though, is that having to undergo a process of de-centralization is easy to be co-opted by corrupt actors who want to go all the way back to capitalism. The Soviet Union struggled with extreme levels of corruption and politicians used the de-centralization trend, which mostly started under Brezhnev although there was a little under Khrushchev, in order to push for full capitalist restoration so that they could suddenly become billionaire oligarchs overnight by privatizing state monopolies and selling them off to their brings for pennies.
One of the reasons this was so successful for the oligarchs is because Gorbachev had started to unravel the Soviet political system by adopting western liberal ideas and implementing them in the Soviet Union through his demokratizatsiya and glasnost, such as introducing competitive elections for president, which effectively separated the powers of the executive branch from the legislative, making the Supreme Soviet no longer a "working body" as described by Marx but a parliamentary body, and then led to the constitutional crisis between Yeltsin and the parliament resulting in the complete collapse of whatever was left of the dying DOTP.
Both the Soviet Union and China had to go through a transition period since both Stalin and Mao centralized the economy far more than what their level of industry could actually support. The difference, though, is that Deng realized this transition period could cause a return to capitalism, so he made an effort to centralize the political system and oppose any attempts to implement liberal ideas into the political superstructure, in order to keep the DOTP strong during this period. For example, Zhao Ziyang was removed from his position and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life because he expressed sympathy with liberal democratic ideas.
Deng introduced the "Four Cardinal Principles" to the country's constitution, requiring that the country always remains on the socialist path, upholds Marxism-Leninism, and upholds the leadership of the Communist Party, making all of these legally not up for debate as they are constitutional law. He also introduced the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to promote the study and education of Marxism (which also played a role in the development of that recent Marx anime). Included in the Four Cardinal Principles was also to uphold Mao Zedong Thought, and Deng also refused to remove Mao's portrait from Tiananmen Gate, because he viewed Khrushchev's "de-Stalinization" as introducing a sort of political nihilism into the country, i.e. making people feel ashamed for the socialist country's past, and thus giving ammunition to capitalist roaders.
Ultimately, the point is, both China and the USSR had to go through a period of transition that could easily lead to capitalist restoration if not done carefully, and doing it carefully required strengthening the DOTP, while the USSR instead weakened it and restored bourgeois elements into the political structure, causing the DOTP to collapse.
Clearly, though, the Soviets did not do this merely due to a bad theoretical understanding of Marxism. Gorbachev is not even a Marxist, he's openly anti-communist saying the only mistake he made was not outlawing the communist party sooner. How the hell does an anti-communist become general secretary of the communist party in the first place? Clearly the Soviet Union had a much bigger problem with corruption and deep problems in its political system.
Because Gorbachev was not a Marxist, not only did he dismantle the DOTP, but his economic reforms made little sense as well. From a Marxian perspective, yes, the Soviets needed to decentralize a bit, but only in underdeveloped sectors of the economy, what Deng Xiaoping called, "grasping the big, letting go of the small". Gorbachev just tried to introduce markets for markets' sake, a bit like how Sears when bankrupt after trying to introduce internal competition for no reason, leading to increased inefficiency and, well, under Gorbachev, a recession.
Ultimately, the difference between Deng and Gorbachev is that Deng was actually a Marxist who wanted to preserve socialism and the DOTP and made efforts to do so, as well as implemented his economic reforms based in Marxian political economy, while Gorbachev was not a Marxist, but because he was raised in a socialist country, he didn't even understand liberal ideas much at all, either, so he was just a know-nothing buffoon who blindly copied things from the west without any regards for his own country's conditions or how they might play out in practice.
summary of the account maxwellhill:
one of the first moderators of default subreddits like r/worldnews, r/politics, r/technology
moderator of r/environment and made many environmental posts particularly focusing on the ocean, which ghislane maxwell also focused on that with her charity
interest in british politics, israeli politics, very neoliberal takes
said they were born in december (ghislaine maxwell's birthday is on christmas)
a redditor since 2006 and the first account to get 1 million karma (currently at nearly 15 million), one of the first members to buy reddit gold before it did anything
stopped posting after arrest, stopped posting for 3 days during the time of the holiday party with former reddit CEO, and stopped posting during the disappearance of madeleine mccann
typed like a boomer with constant ellipsis
posted a blog called "3 strong reasons why child porn must be re-legalized in the coming decade"
made thousands of posts on r/worldnews and r/politics but avoided posting about epstein
article from 2011: The Story of the Most Successful Man/Woman??? on Reddit