emizeko

declassified from the JKF files (page 4):

He mentioned specifically the possibility of producing crop failures by the introduction of biological agents which would appear to be of natural origin. Mr. Bundy said that he had no worries about any such sabotage which could clearly be made to appear as the result of local Cuban disaffection or of a natural disaster, but that we must avoid external activities such as release of chemicals, etc., unless they could be completely covered up.

this CIA doc which talks about how the CIA purposefully introduced African swine fever into cuba. The US is never afraid to use biological terrorism

Biological war waged by the US against Cuba

—1962: A US intelligence agent is known to have given several thousand dollars to a Canadian to introduce a disease infecting Cuban sea-turtles.

—1965: A plastic balloon descends on a farm in Santiago de las Vegas. When it hits the ground it expels a white dust that spreads to cane plantation which is later destroyed.

—1968: A foreign specialist working for an international agency is expelled after he is confirmed to have introduced a virus affecting coffee crops.

—1970: The US is caught seeding clouds over Cuba in an attempt to affect the sugar harvest. The project was part of a larger research plan called "The Cooling" which was intended to devise ways of manipulating the weather for political reasons.

—1971: African swine fever is introduced. The Cubans claim that the container transporting the virus came from Fort Gullick, a US military base in the Panama Canal Zone. Those involved in this attack have since testified to their part. The entire pig population of Cuba had to be slaughtered.

—1977: Cane smut is detected in Pilón, eastern Cuba. The disease had never been known in Cuba until this date.

—1978: A previously unknown variety Blue mould hits the sugar crops causing losses of approximately 344 million pesos.

—1978: Sugar cane rust affects a new variety of cane imported from Barbados. As a result 1.35 million tonnes of sugar are lost.

—1979-80: Two different strains of African swine fever are discovered emanating from distinct areas of contamination. 300,00 pigs are slaughtered.

—1981: A previously unknown Bovine skin disease erupts affecting young cows and bullocks throughout the island.

—1981: A sudden outbreak of haemorrhagic dengue fever affects 350,000 people. 158 people, including children, die from the disease. The disease is later discovered to be exactly the same strain of the disease which caused an outbreak in New Guinea in 1924 but no others in the world except the Cuban case. The outbreak had three initial breeding grounds in Cienfuegos and Camagüey, all very close to international air corridors. Just prior to the outbreak it was discovered that the entire personnel at the Guantanamo naval base had been vaccinated against dengue. As a result there was not a single case of the disease in the base.

—1981: Haemorraghic conjunctivitis caused by the Enterovirus 70 strain spreads throughout the island. The Pan American Health Organisation is baffled because this strain had never been seen in the entire hemisphere before.

—1982: The US magazine Covert Action, August 6, 1982, suggests the dengue outbreak might have been a CIA plot.

—1984: Eduardo Arocena, a counter-revolutionary of Cuban origin and head of the Omega-7 terrorist organisation, stands trial in the US accused of the murder of Felix Garcia Rodriguez, a Cuban diplomat to the UN. Arocena confesses to having introduced 'germs' into Cuba as part of the US biological war against Cuba. He affirms that the dengue outbreak was introduced by terrorist groups into the island.

—1984: An outbreak of dysentery causes the death of 18 children in Guantánamo province. Investigators pin down the start of the outbreak to two workers who had participated in a festive activity inside the Guantánamo naval base. The disease was again of a type previously unknown in Cuba.

—1985: An infectious bronchitis poultry virus seriously disrupts egg production.

—1989: Ulcerative mammillitis in dairy cattle caused by a herpes virus spreads throughout the island affecting milk yields.

—1990: Black sigatoka, infects banana plantations throughout the island. Once again the disease had been hitherto unknown on the island. The disease appeared precisely as Cuba began to put plans into action to start intensive banana production.

—1991: Acariasis disease which affects bees is discovered, just as Cuban honey starts to be exported.

—1991: 30,000 tobacco seedlings are discovered to be 15 per cent infected with fusorio which once in the soil means tobacco production has to be halted for three years.

—1992: Black plant louse which carries a citrus disease known as tristeza (sadness) is discovered.

—1994: Citric sapper blight is found in Pinar del Rio and Camagüey.

—1993: 122,135 rabbits have to be slaughtered after an outbreak of a viral disease.

—1995: February 10. A camera case in the luggage of a visiting US scientist is found to contain four small test tubes of a biological substance. On examination it is discovered to be the citric tristeza virus.

—1995: Coffee borer discovered in Granma province. Losses of 80 per cent were attributed to it and considerable resources had to be spent on containing it.

—1996: Varroasis, another bee disease is diagnosed in three apiaries in Matanzas. Previously unknown in Cuba, this disease is the worst of all affecting honey production.

—1996: Thrips Palmi attack in Matanzas by State Department plane.

—2018: New Dengue Fever epidemic in Cuba

from https://afrocubaweb.com/biowar.htm

In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favourable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation, and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slaveowners. Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that "they cannot be bothered with democracy", "cannot be bothered with politics"; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life.

[...]

Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich— that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the “petty”— supposedly petty— details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for “paupers”!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc.,— we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been in close contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.

—Lenin, State and Revolution

weird how the marshall plan gave germany more money to rebuild than the USSR

weird how germany's rapid reconstruction was called an "economic miracle"

weird how the west german leader who joined NATO pivoted from denazification to restructuring

weird how he also didn't recognize the GDR as legitimate

weird how his party was called the Catholic "centre" party

weird how the USSR lost 25 million people and most of its industrial capacity to the nazis

weird how all the nazi ghouls who survived nuremburg ended up in organizations like NATO

weird how NATO was formed 6 years before the Warsaw Pact

weird how missiles were stationed in Turkey by US/NATO before the USSR put theirs in Cuba

weird how every organic post-colonial movement, regardless of political leanings, was framed as a USSR client state

weird how every US-backed coup was framed as freedom and democracy

weird weird weird weird

It's always funny to me when Westerners can't even conceive of why anyone would support the Chinese government. Imagine being a middle-aged Chinese person who watched all this happen. Within living memory, you went from the tail end of the century of humiliation, emerging from under the heel of Western hegemony, and now you're a world superpower of unprecedented independence from that hegemony. For the first time in the history of the colonial world, a country of the oppressed has risen up by its own power to challenge the oppressors that have spent the past 400 years immiserating every non-white country on earth. They went from ox carts to high speed rail in one lifetime. From colonial humiliation, to unprecedented pride and dignity for the first counterhegemonic force outside the West in the history of capitalism. They can look around themselves and see several examples of countries like India and Myanmar that didn't choose communism, couldn't challenge the West, didn't have a cultural revolution (it was a mixed bag of very good and very bad) and they can see, clear as day, where their path led them vs the path the West would have preferred for them. Vassalage. Poverty. Exploitation. Rural idiocy, as Lenin put it. The path the West still wants to put them back on.

credit to u/Gravelord-_Nito

Lenin undertook his detailed study of Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1916, basing it on the research of an English economist named Hobson. His analysis continues to explain what is happening in the world today as we enter the 21st Century.

Lenin saw capitalism evolving into a higher stage. The key to understanding it was an economic analysis of the transition to monopoly: "...imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism." As Lenin would point out in another article written in 1916 (Imperialism and the Split in Socialism), imperialism was a new development that had been predicted but not yet seen by Marx and Engels.

Lenin provides a careful, 5-point definition of imperialism: "(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this "finance capital", of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed."

the bourgeoisie are increasingly compelled by a falling rate of profit to use their dominance of the state apparatus to open new markets or access to resource extraction

“Freedom of the press” is another of the principal slogans of “pure democracy”. And here, too, the workers know — and socialists everywhere have admitted it millions of times — that this freedom is a deception while the best printing presses and the biggest stocks of paper are appropriated by the capitalists and while capitalist rule over the press remains, a rule that is manifested throughout the world all the more strikingly, sharply, and cynically, the more democracy and the republican system are developed, as in America for example.

The first thing to do to win real equality and genuine democracy for the working people, for the workers and peasants, is to deprive capital of the possibility of hiring writers, buying up publishing houses, and hiring newspapers. And to do that the capitalists and exploiters have to be overthrown and their resistance suppressed.

The capitalists have always used the term ‘freedom’ to mean freedom for the rich to get richer and for the workers to starve to death.

In capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion.

In this respect, too, the defenders of ‘pure democracy’ prove to be defenders of an utterly foul and venal system that gives the rich control over the mass media. They prove to be deceivers of the people who, with the aid of plausible, fine-sounding, but thoroughly false phrases, divert them from the concrete historical task of liberating the press from capitalist enslavement.

—Lenin, Congress of the First Comintern

Why can’t capitalists replicate these strategies, even cynically, in pursuit of long-term profit? As per Lenin, “the degree of concentration which has been reached forces [capitalists] to adopt [imperialism] in order to obtain profits.” These strategies are only available to China because the CPC — China’s sovereign, the political authority — is able to check the power of capital.

from https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/

Let’s begin with the classic case of US military film propaganda. In The Green Berets, Western star John Wayne convinces sceptical news reporters that the Vietnam War is necessary and leads a team of Green Berets (US Special Forces) and Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) soldiers on a successful mission to capture a top North Vietnamese field commander.

During production of Green Berets, the DOD requested that the scriptwriter delete any mention of the soldiers entering Laos because it ‘raises sensitive questions.’ Presumably, these questions revolved around the fact that in the real world the US had been secretly bombing a neutral country for the past three years.

In a scene that explains the purpose of the war at the start of the film, Francis Tully, Speech Review Staff for the Department of State, also suggested that the scriptwriters insert the following language:

We do not see this as a civil war, and it is not. South Vietnam is an independent country, seeking to maintain its independence in the face of aggression by a neighbouring country. Our goal is to help the South Vietnamese retain their freedom, and to develop in the way they want to, without interference from outside the country.

These lines do not appear in the final film, but Tully’s suggestion indicates that he hoped to simplify the war in Vietnam in a way that Americans could support, and this simplification occurs though in the final version of the scene, as military leaders explain to reporters that the war boils down to stopping 'Communist domination of the world.'

from National Security Cinema by Alford & Secker [PDF]

So you compare a country to what it came from, with all its imperfections... and those who demand instant perfection, the day after the revolution they get up and say "are there civil liberties for the fascists?? Do they get to have their newspapers and their radio programmes? Are they gonna be able to keep all their farms?"

The passion that some of our liberals feel the day after the revolution - the passion and concern they feel for the fascists, the civil rights and civil liberties of those fascists - who were dumping and destroying and murdering people before.

My criteria is— what happens to those people that couldn't read? What happens to those babies that couldn't eat, that died of hunger? See that's why I support revolution. The revolution that feeds the children gets my support.

—Michael Parenti

Solzhenitsyn's Ex‐Wife Says ‘Gulag’ Is ‘Folklore’, 1974:

PARIS, Feb. 5 (Reuters)—Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's controversial new book on Soviet prison‐camps was described as “folklore” by his former wife in an interview published here today.

Natelya Reshetovskaya told the conservative newspaper Le Figaro that the book, “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956,” was based on unreliable information:

She also told the newspaper's Moscow correspondent that she was still living with Mr. Soizhenitsyn when he wrote the book and that she had typed part of it. They parted in 1970 and were subsequently divorced.

She said: “The subject of ‘Gulag Archipelago,’ as I felt at the moment when he was writing it, is not in fact the life of the country and not even the life of the camps but the folklore of the camps.”

her NYTimes obituary 2003:

In her 1974 memoir, ''Sanya: My Life with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn'' (Bobbs-Merrill), she wrote that she was ''perplexed'' that the West had accepted ''The Gulag Archipelago'' as ''the solemn, ultimate truth,'' saying its significance had been ''overestimated and wrongly appraised.''

Pointing out that the book's subtitle is ''An Experiment in Literary Investigation,'' she said that her husband did not regard the work as ''historical research, or scientific research.'' She contended that it was, rather, a collection of ''camp folklore,'' containing ''raw material'' which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.

best Internet comment award, 2008:

Solzhenitsyn was a Nazi propagandist in the 1940's and affirmed that the war against Nazism was avoidable and a compromise with Hitler possible. That was why he was sent to a labor camp, for being a traitor.

His hatred for Jews that became public knowledge in recent years may explain his Nazi sympathies. Predictably, he was also a great fan of the Spanish fascist dictator Franco, whom he went to support when his regime began to totter. He appeared on Spanish TV to plead with Spaniards to remember the "freedom" they enjoyed under Franco while Soviet citizens were "enslaved" by socialism.

Solzhenitsyn was never a dissident but enjoyed the full support of Nikita Khruschev when he wrote the Gulag Archipelago, which Khrushchev used as propaganda material during his purge of Stalinists.

Nazi lover, Jew hater, monarchist: No wonder he became the darling of the West.

NYTimes obituary 2003 :

In her 1974 memoir, ''Sanya: My Life with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn'' (Bobbs-Merrill), she wrote that she was ''perplexed'' that the West had accepted ''The Gulag Archipelago'' as ''the solemn, ultimate truth,'' saying its significance had been ''overestimated and wrongly appraised.''

Pointing out that the book's subtitle is ''An Experiment in Literary Investigation,'' she said that her husband did not regard the work as ''historical research, or scientific research.'' She contended that it was, rather, a collection of ''camp folklore,'' containing ''raw material'' which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.

bonus from 1974:

PARIS, Feb. 5 (Reuters)—Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's controversial new book on Soviet prison‐camps was described as “folklore” by his former wife in an interview published here today.

Natelya Reshetovskaya told the conservative newspaper Le Figaro that the book, “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956,” was based on unreliable information:

She also told the newspaper's Moscow correspondent that she was still living with Mr. Soizhenitsyn when he wrote the book and that she had typed part of it. They parted in 1970 and were subsequently divorced.

She said: “The subject of ‘Gulag Archipelago,’ as I felt at the moment when he was writing it, is not in fact the life of the country and not even the life of the camps but the folklore of the camps.”