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The 9 Greatest Horror-Road Movies Ever Made – by John Nolte – 29 Oct 2022

Paramount

JOHN NOLTE

29 Oct 202260

12:39

One of my favorite genres is the car movie. It doesn’t get any better than watching Americans behind the wheel, especially in movies produced between the late 1960s and 1980. During those 15 or so years — before America became Generica (chains, box stores, etc.) — road movies were shot in color, on-location, and this country looked amazing, lived in, and real. Part of it, certainly, is the capturing of an era that represents my childhood.

In this genre, it’s the vehicle that matters. It’s not just about being on the road; it’s about the joy of driving, the freedom that comes with being behind the wheel, living life on your own terms, and refusing to conform… Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974), Smokey and the Bandit (1977), The Last American Hero (1973), The Driver (1978), Vanishing Point (1971), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), The Gumball Rally (1976)…

My other favorite genre is, of course, horror. And I am no snob when it comes to horror. Thrill me, scare me, soak me in dread, make me laugh, show me some bewbs… We’re good.

With this in mind, imagine how much I love horror movies that take place on the road.

Now, I want to be precise about this. Movies like Psycho (1960), The Vanishing (1988), Vacancy (2007), Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), and The Hills Have Eyes (1977) involve our protagonists hitting the road. Yet, these classics don’t count, at least not with me. Why? Because the horror takes place at their destination.

To me, road horror takes place on the road, with our protagonists always on the move.

Here are nine of my favorites that meet that criterion.

9. Kalifornia (1993)

After you buy into the ridiculous premise that Brian Kessler (David Duchovney) is researching serial killers and just happens to attract serial killer Early Grayce (Brad Pitt) with a ride-share ad, you can relax and settle in for a bloody good time.

Along for the cross-country ride are Brian’s girlfriend Carrie (Michelle Forbes) and Early’s gal-pal Adele (Juliette Lewis).

By 1993, thanks to Thelma & Louise (1991) and A River Runs Through It (1992), Pitt was already a pretty-boy movie star. Kalifornia was about Pitt proving he was something more, which he does. He’s lost entirely in the disturbing role of a cold-blooded murderer always on the knife edge of committing some horrible act of violence.

Equally great — and when isn’t she great? — is Juliette Lewis as Grayce’s damaged and childish girlfriend.

Kalifornia is a slow crank of suspense, violence, and dread as Early tries to hide the fact he’s broke and overcome his resentments towards his somewhat snobby road companions. In this respect, the movie has something to say about social class as the urbane and sophisticated Brian and Carrie attempt to befriend two people they see as white trash.

Just when you think you know where this one’s headed…

8. The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

A bit of a cheat. Hey, it’s my list. Director Ida Lupino (also a beautiful and famous movie star) enjoyed a respectable directing career, which was rare for a woman in those days. On-screen, she was a glamorous A-star. Behind the camera, in a series of independent films such as Outrage (1950), Never Fear (1949), and The Bigamist (1953), she told individual stories about everyday people dealing with the kind of issues big studios didn’t touch.

The Hitch-Hiker is truly special, the movie that proves Lupino was a very good director. Creating suspense and dread is not a skill many directors have. The Hitch-Hiker is 71 minutes of pure suspense and dread and therefore close enough to horror to make this list.

Two friends (the great Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy) are headed to Mexico for a fishing trip. Along the way, they pick up a hitchhiker (William Talman), who proceeds to terrorize them.

Based in part on the true and horrible story of executed spree-murderer Billy Cook, Ida Lupino’s gem is a sleek, memorable trip into your worst nightmare.

7. Joy Ride (2001)

What makes Joy Ride special is not only its premise and several excellent and truly suspenseful set pieces but the care the story takes in allowing us to get to know the characters. Directed by John Dahl, the genius behind the brilliant Red Rock West (1993) — which desperately needs an American Blu-ray release — and co-written by J.J. Abrams, this is a movie about payback.

Steve Zahn steals the show as Fuller, the self-described “black sheep” and “somewhat troubled older brother” to Paul Walker’s Lewis, a guy who can’t work up the nerve to tell his best friend Venna (Leelee Sobieski) how he feels about her.

Nerve is not an issue with Fuller, who talks Lewis into pulling a CB prank on Rusty Nail, a lonely truck driver. When the prank goes sideways, the brothers find themselves morally culpable for something horrible. That, however, is the least of their problems.

One of my favorite things about Joy Ride is how it catches you completely off guard after the whole ordeal appears to be over.

An uncredited Ted Levine is perfect as the disembodied voice on the CB radio calling out, “Candy cane. Candy cane.”

6. Roadgames (1981)

Directed by Hitchcock’s friend and student Richard Franklin (Psycho II), Roadgames pays tribute to the Master of Suspense with a concept described as “Rear Window on the road.”

Stacy Keach is outstanding as Quid, an American employed as an independent truck driver in the wilds of Australia. Keach delivers a Movie Star Performance, a thing filled with that kind of charisma that earns your goodwill forever.

Parked across the road with his pet “dingo,” Quid believes he’s witnessed the murder of a hitchhiker. First, he’s not sure. Then he talks himself out of what he saw. But only one road crosses Australia, so Quid and the murderer are basically traveling together. And things start to happen that Quid can’t explain away.

Along the way, Quid picks up a hitchhiker (Jamie Lee Curtis), comes under suspicion for murder, and then loses Jamie Lee.

Fun, funny, suspenseful, and a wonderful tour of rural Australia.

5. Duel (1971)

Steven Spielberg’s feature debut is still a TV movie for the ages.

Scripted by Richard Matheson (from his own short story), Spielberg expertly previews Jaws. In this case, the giant shark is a menacing Peterbilt tanker (we never see the driver), the ocean is the Mojave Desert, and Sheriff Brody is David Mann (Dennis Weaver).

Mann has a road rage moment he’ll regret forever. This Peterbilt is out to kill, and nothing will stop it.

Working with a TV-movie budget, Duel is memorably and brilliantly directed by a 25-year-old genius, a slow burn of paranoia and terror effective enough to earn an overseas theatrical release.

4. Breakdown (1997)

Although Breakdown was a modest success in its day, it still felt underappreciated. It blew me right out of my chair.

Director Jonathan Mostow (who also earns story credit) brought together a terrific cast (Kurt Russell, Kathleen Quinlan, and especially J.T. Walsh) to deliver a credible story about an everyman put into an impossible situation.

Walsh is dynamite as the charismatic kidnapper. Russell is equally good as the everyman driven to extraordinary lengths to rescue his doomed wife. Breakdown is 93 minutes of suspense so well-crafted that it holds up just fine with subsequent viewings.

Most impressive is how believable it is. Russell’s character is not a former Navy SEAL or police officer. He has no superpowers. This is not one of those movies where a guy with a very particular set of skills finally has enough. Throughout, Russell is a terrified husband in way over his head. What this adds to the suspense is incalculable.

J.T. Walsh’s untimely death hit the following year. I still miss him.

3. Race with the Devil (1975)

Roger (The Mighty Peter Fonda) and his wife Kelly (Lara Parker) head out of San Antonio in a brand-new RV with their best friends Frank (The Mighty Warren Oates) and Alice (Loretta Swit). The destination is a long overdue skiing vacation in Colorado, and the trip there is meant to be full of leisure, motorcycle racing, and booze.

On their first night, Roger and Frank decide to boondock somewhere in central Texas. Long after dark, they witness a Satanic ritual across a shallow river. A woman is sacrificed. Roger and Frank are spotted. The relentless chase is on.

Other than the glorious sight of Peter Fonda standing atop a speeding RV firing off a shotgun at devil worshippers, what makes this under-appreciated classic work is its growing sense of paranoia. Over 88 perfectly paced minutes, everyone and everything looks sinister until we arrive at a stunner of an ending that freaked out my 11-year-old self for weeks.

B-movie Heaven!

2. The Hitcher (1986)

There’s no question that Rutger Hauer as John Ryder  personifies hulking and charismatic menace in an iconic way unseen since Robert Mitchum’s turn as Max Cady in Cape Fear (1962). But let’s not forget how great C. Thomas Howell is as Jim Halsey, aka Ryder’s prey. The movie rests on his young shoulders, and the then-21-year-old carries it beautifully.

Director Robert Harmon and screenwriter Eric Red don’t screw around. Within just a few minutes, Halsey picks up spree-killer Ryder. That’s only one of the many genius moments in Red’s debut screenplay. Here, what would normally be the second-act turning point opens the movie. Act two begins in a wild moment where Ryder could easily kill Halsey and instead wordlessly communicates that he’ll kill him only after he’s made his life hell.

The Hitcher is a rarity, a perfect movie. Beautifully directed and shot, the script is a miracle, believable throughout, and filled with moments that both make sense and shock you. Jennifer Jason Leigh is perfect as Nash, the local waitress who we expect to become the love interest, but is so much more.

I saw this in the theater, never forgot it, and was stunned to watch it fail at the box office and get murdered by critics. Both Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave it zero (!) stars.

Believe me… on this one, I’m right, and everyone else is wrong.

1. Near Dark (1987)

Co-written by Hitcher scribe Eric Red and director Kathryn Bigelow, Near Dark is still the best vampire movie ever made. This stunner is also Bigelow’s directorial debut, and until Zero Dark Thirty (2012), it remained the finest entry in her catalog of terrific films.

A family of nomadic vampires is on the hunt in rural Oklahoma. But Mae (a perfectly cast and ethereal Jenny Wright) is taken with Caleb (Adrian Pasdar), so rather than feast on him, she turns him. Thrust into a dark world of real-life monsters, Caleb can’t bring himself to kill, which puts him at odds with a rough bunch of wild and dangerous bloodsuckers.

Everything works in this classic neo-Western. Coming straight from the Aliens (1986) set, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, and Jenette Goldstein have such easy chemistry you never doubt they’ve been hunting together for decades. Twelve-year-old Joshua John Miller is terrifying as Homer, a grown man stuck forever in a child’s body.

The eerie and deeply unsettling score by Tangerine Dream, the astonishing cinematography, and Bigelow’s second-to-none genius behind the camera adds up to not just one of the best horror movies ever made, but one of the best movie-movies ever made.

………………………..

https://archive.ph/OvUjW

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.

US: The lockdowns of 2020 were very real. And few opposed them. – by Michael P. Senger – 28 Oct 2022

Lockdowns: The Great Gaslighting

More than two years since the lockdowns of 2020, the political mainstream, particularly on the left, is just beginning to realize that the response to Covid was an unprecedented catastrophe.

But that realization hasn’t taken the form of a mea culpa. Far from it. On the contrary, in order to see that reality is starting to dawn on the mainstream left, one must read between the lines of how their narrative on the response to Covid has evolved over the past two years.

The narrative now goes something like this: Lockdowns never really happened, because governments never actually locked people in their homes; but if there were lockdowns, then they saved millions of lives and would have saved even more if only they’d been stricter; but if there were any collateral damage, then that damage was an inevitable consequence of the fear from the virus independent of the lockdowns; and even when things were shut down, the rules weren’t very strict; but even when the rules were strict, we didn’t really support them.

Put simply, the prevailing narrative of the mainstream left is that any upside from the response to Covid is attributable to the state-ordered closures and mandates that they supported, while any downside was an inevitable consequence of the virus independent of any state-ordered closures and mandates which never happened and which anyway they never supported. Got it? Good.

This perplexing narrative was perfectly encapsulated in a recent viral tweet by a history professor who griped about the difficulty of convincing his students that government mandates had nothing to do with the fact that they couldn’t leave their homes in 2020.

(cont. https://archive.ph/MW16b )

US: How Big Pharma Monetised Depression – A Lucrative Myth – by Robert Whitaker – Oct 2022

America has been sold a lucrative myth

We are, if you believe the headlines, living in the midst of an unprecedented mental health crisis, exacerbated by the stress and isolation of the pandemic. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at the end of May, nearly 40% of American adults had experienced symptoms of depression and anxiety during the past month, with nearly a quarter filling a prescription for an antidepressant or other psychiatric drug. The rise in mental health problems has been particularly dramatic among the young: the New York Times reported in July that between 2017 and 2021, antidepressant use rose by 41% among American teenagers.

Often, such grim descriptions are paired with an upbeat solution: better access to mental health care, including psychiatric drugs. Given the understanding of mental health that has been promoted to the public for the past 40 years, this advice makes sense. We have come to understand that depression and other mental problems are disorders of the brain. Psychiatric treatments fix this brain disorder, or at least induce changes in the brain that are helpful to the suffering person.

However, if the past is prologue to the future, this understanding will continue to make the problem worse. For the past 35 years, we have sought to spread “awareness” of depression and other mental health issues. This has led to a dramatic increase in the prescribing of antidepressants: in 1990, the CDC reported that fewer than 3% of adults had taken an antidepressant during the previous month — a number that rose to 13.2% in 2018 and 23.1% earlier this year. Yet the burden of depression in the United States and other Western countries has only risen during this time.

There is a fundamental reason why. We have organised our thinking, and care, around a narrative of medical progress — of effective drugs that fix chemical imbalances in the brain — that isn’t to be found in the scientific literature. And the chasm between what is told to the public and what is found in the scientific literature has led our societies astray.

Writers, philosophers, and doctors have long observed that melancholy — a time of sadness or grief — visits nearly everyone now and then. As the 17th-century physician Robert Burton advised in The Anatomy of Melancholy, “it is most absurd and ridiculous for any mortal man to look for a perpetual tenure of happiness in this life”. It was only when melancholy became a “habit” that it could be considered a “disease”.

This was the understanding that prevailed until the Eighties. People often suffered bouts of depression, particularly in response to setbacks in life, but such feelings were seen as normal. Depression was only a “disease” in cases where people stayed depressed for no apparent reason, and these were rare. Community surveys conducted in the Thirties and Forties in the United States found that fewer than one in a thousand adults suffered an episode of “clinical depression” each year. Among this group, most did not need to be hospitalised, and only a small minority became chronically ill.

These findings led experts at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in the Seventies to advise the public that depression was an episodic disorder, which would generally clear up on its own. Most depressive episodes, wrote Dean Schuyler, head of the depression section at the NIMH, “will run their course and terminate with virtually complete recovery without specific intervention”.

However, this understanding of depression was soon to disappear.

During the Seventies, leaders of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) worried that their field was in crisis. Critics argued that psychiatry functioned more as an agency of social control than as a medical discipline, that its diagnoses lacked validity, and that its brand of talk therapy, psychoanalysis, was no more effective than other therapies offered by psychologists and counsellors.

In response, American psychiatry decided to rebrand itself. The public needed to understand that psychiatrists were medical doctors who cared for patients with real diseases. Not only would this rebranding improve psychiatry’s public image, but it would also give psychiatrists a privileged place in the therapeutic marketplace. They had the power to prescribe drugs, while psychologists and counsellors did not.

The APA, when it published the third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1980, reconceptualised psychiatric disorders as diseases of the brain. The age-old distinction between ordinary depressive episodes and “clinical depression” was dropped, and both were lumped together as a single “disease”. Nancy Andreasen, future editor of the American Journal of Psychiatry, set forth tenets of this new psychiatry in her 1984 book, The Broken Brain. “The major psychiatric illnesses are diseases,” she wrote. “They should be considered medical illnesses just as diabetes, heart disease and cancer are.” With this understanding in mind, the APA quickly set out to market its new model of depression to the public.

It found an ally in pharmaceutical companies, who were also eager to change the narrative. Erasing the distinction between ordinary depression and clinical depression promised to create a huge market for antidepressants. Pharmaceutical companies gave money to the APA to develop its PR machinery in the early Eighties, and then, in 1988, they provided funds to support a NIMH campaign, called the Depression Awareness, Recognition and Treatment (DART) program, that was designed to sell the disease model to the public.

In anticipation of this campaign, the NIMH had conducted a survey of public attitudes about depression. Only 12% of Americans said they would take a pill — an antidepressant — to treat a depressive episode. And 78% said they “would live with it until it passed, confident that they could handle it with their own”. The purpose of DART was to relieve the public of this “misconception”. According to the NIMH, Americans needed to understand that depression was a “disorder” that regularly went “underdiagnosed and undertreated”. Absent treatment, it could become a “fatal disease”.

The public was also presented with a new — apparently scientific — theory of depression: that it was caused by a lack of serotonin in the brain. Thankfully, scientists had discovered a medicine, selective-serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), that fixed this chemical imbalance. Prozac and other SSRIs were heralded in the media as “breakthrough medications” that could not only fix depressed patients but make them feel “better than well”.

Untreated depression was now presented as a pressing public health concern. Most important, people were being trained to monitor their own emotions, and to treat sadness or emotional discomfort as symptoms of a disease requiring medical intervention.

The PR blitz worked. In a 2005 press release, the APA shared the “good news”: 75% of consumers now understood that “mental illnesses are usually caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain”.

The low-serotonin theory of depression arose in the Sixties from the discovery of how the first generation of antidepressants, tricyclics and monoamine oxidase inhibitors, altered normal brain function. Both hindered the normal removal of serotonin (a monoamine) from the synaptic cleft between neurons.

Once this “mechanism of action” was discovered, researchers hypothesised that perhaps depression was due to too little serotonin. However, when researchers ran experiments to test whether people diagnosed with depression, prior to being medicated, suffered from low serotonin, the results were disappointing. As early as 1984, NIMH investigators concluded that “elevations or decrements in the functioning of serotonergic systems per se are not likely to be associated with depression”.

Investigations into the low-serotonin theory continued, but none provided convincing evidence to support it, and in 1999, the APA, in the third edition of its Textbook of Psychiatry, declared the theory dead, writing that decades of research “has not confirmed the monoamine depletion hypothesis”.

These conclusions were never promoted to the public, and so, this past June, when British investigators published a review of the history of this research and found there was no evidence to support the low-serotonin theory of depression, their conclusions were reported as shocking. In fact, we have known as much for two decades.

The real story, however, is even worse. Antidepressants block the normal reuptake of serotonin from the synaptic cleft. In response, the brain adapts to try to maintain its normal functioning. Since antidepressants raise serotonin, the brain responds by dialing down its own serotonergic machinery. In other words, antidepressants induce the very abnormality — a deficit in serotonergic function — hypothesised to cause depression in the first place.

Antidepressants, then, do not fix any known disorder. But, their defenders might counter, could they nonetheless help depressed people?

Here, too, the evidence is thin. In the world of “evidence-based” medicine, placebo-controlled, double-blind randomised trials (RCTs) are the gold standard for assessing a drug’s effectiveness. A recent meta-analysis of such studies determined that 15% of depressed patients treated with an antidepressant experience a short-term benefit; the remaining 85% are exposed to the adverse effects of the drugs without any benefit beyond placebo.

Even those short-term results suggest a major problem with widespread use of antidepressants: six of seven patients experience the drugs’ side-effects without any corresponding benefit. The most common side-effect may be sexual dysfunction, which in some cases can last long after patients stop taking the drugs. But some patients can also suffer from a drug-induced worsening of their original symptoms.

There are two notable elements of this drug-induced worsening. First, antidepressants triple the risk that a depressed patient, within 10 months of initial treatment, will turn manic and be diagnosed as bipolar, which is a much more severe disorder than depression. Second, over the long-term, antidepressants increase the risk that a person will remain symptomatic and functionally impaired.

The latter worry showed up in the Seventies, not long after antidepressants were introduced. At that time, clinicians still had a memory of depressive episodes that regularly cleared up without the use of drugs, and several reported that patients treated with antidepressants were now relapsing more frequently than before. Epidemiological studies agreed. The third edition of the APA’s Textbook of Psychiatry, published in 1999, summed up the disappointing findings: Only about 15% of patients treated with antidepressants recover and are still well at the end of one year.

Studies conducted since then suggest that even that 15% recovery rate may be too high. In the largest antidepressant trial ever conducted, the STAR*D study, only 108 of the 4041 patients who entered the trial remitted and remained well at the end of one year, a stay-well rate of 3%. The vast majority never remitted, remitted and then relapsed, or dropped out of the study. Meanwhile, a 2006 NIMH study of depressed patients who didn’t take antidepressants found that 85% recovered after one year, just like in the pre-antidepressant era.

Naturalistic studies in depressed patients regularly find that, over the long term, medicated patients are more likely to remain symptomatic and to become functionally impaired. These findings led Italian psychiatrist Giovanni Fava to propose, in a series of papers dating back to the Nineties, that antidepressants induce a biological change in the brain that makes patients more vulnerable to depression. As Rif El-Mallakh, an expert in mood disorders at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, put it in a 2011 paper: “A chronic and treatment-resistant depressive state is proposed to occur in individuals who are exposed to potent antagonist of serotonin reuptake pumps (i.e., SSRIs) for prolonged time periods.”

In other words, there is reason to believe that the mass prescription of antidepressants is making us, on the whole, more depressed. Indeed, the “economic burden” of depression — composed of workplace-related costs (absence from work), suicide-related costs, and direct-care costs — has steadily risen since the SSRIs came on the market. In 1990, it was calculated at $116 billion in inflation-adjusted terms. By 2020, it had nearly tripled to $326 billion.

Disability due to mood disorders has also risen. In community surveys conducted in 1991 and again in 2002, 30% of the adult population was found to suffer from an anxiety, mood, or substance disorder, based on DSM diagnostic criteria. However, while the prevalence of these disorders didn’t change, the percentage of people who got treated did, rising from 20% in 1991 to 33% in 2002. Over the same period, the number of American adults receiving a government disability payment due to a mood disorder rose from 292,000 to 940,000.

Following the publication of DSM III in 1980, the public was told a story of a great advance in medicine. Research had found that depression was due to a chemical imbalance, which antidepressants fixed. We organised our thinking around that narrative: depression was a biological “disease” that required medical treatment. This false narrative is the root cause of our mental health crisis today.

The tragedy is that there is another, more optimistic narrative about depression that exists in the scientific literature. This narrative informs us that human beings are responsive to their environments, and that depressive episodes often arise in response to setbacks in life. Time, and finding ways to change one’s environment, regularly lead to a spontaneous remission of depressive feelings.

A society that wants to promote good “mental health” should strive first to create more nurturing environments — improving access to housing and childcare, and working toward a more equal distribution of financial resources. It should also favour, as a first response, holistic treatments for depression — diet, exercise, walks in nature, social engagements, and so forth — as these complement our natural capacity to recover.

Antidepressants could still serve as a useful tool. Their use would simply need to be informed by research that tells of their limited short-term efficacy and of their potential negative long-term effects. Doctors would also need to inform patients that these drugs do not fix a “chemical imbalance”. True informed consent would dramatically reduce the use of these drugs, and surely diminish prescribing habits that treat them as a go-to response.

Paradigm shifts do happen, and today’s mental health crisis is telling us that one is desperately needed. Forty years of the disease model of depression has left us sicker and unhappier than ever before. There is little reason to believe that more of the same will fix our problems, and plenty of reason to think it will continue to make them worse.

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https://archive.ph/Nv35T

Source

Russian ‘Left’ Split Over Ukraine War – by Ilya Budraitkis (Le Monde Diplomatique) 1 June 2022

Under Vladimir Putin, Russia’s Communist Party has been a tame opposition kept on a tight leash. With a few brave exceptions, the party has eagerly supported the war in Ukraine.

June 1, 2022 Ilya Budraitkis  LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE

Remembering Lenin’s birthday: CPRF chair Gennady Zyuganov (centre left) at a rally, April 2022,Konstantin Zavrazhin/Le Monde diplomatique

In his address on 22 February, just before Russia invaded Ukraine, Vladimir Putin set out his ideological justification for the war. He presented Ukraine, within its current borders, as an artificial entity created by the Bolsheviks, which today can ‘rightfully [be] called “Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine” ’.

Putin, who on coming to power 20 years ago, described the break-up of the USSR as a ‘major geopolitical disaster’, now believes the real tragedy was the creation of the Soviet Union: ‘The disintegration of our united country was brought about by historic, strategic mistakes on the part of the Bolshevik leaders,’ he said, and criticised Lenin for giving every republic the constitutional right to leave the Soviet Union. By making the war in Ukraine what he calls a ‘real “decommunisation” ’, Putin wants to finally turn the page on Soviet history and return to the principles of the pre-revolutionary Russian empire.

This overt anti-communism did not stop the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) — or rather, its leadership — unreservedly backing Putin’s ‘special operation’ in Ukraine. This is because the party, the second largest in the Duma, has in recent years undergone a major transformation of its activist base and especially its voters, some of whom are now suffering repression for being part of the anti-war movement.

Although in the introduction to its manifesto, the CPRF claims to be the direct descendant of the Bolshevik party, its real history dates from 1993. Two years earlier, after the demise of the USSR, President Boris Yeltsin had dissolved the Soviet Communist Party, which then spawned a multitude of leftwing political groups fiercely opposed to the ‘shock therapy’ Yeltsin had administered to Russia’s economy. To sideline them, the government encouraged a new, moderate opposition that was prepared to play by the rules of the new political game. Yeltsin therefore authorised a re-formed communist party, having decided not to ban ‘criminal communist ideology’, as some Eastern European countries had done.

In February 1993 the CPRF’s founding congress elected Gennady Zyuganov as leader (a position he still holds). After the forcible dissolution of the Supreme Soviet (Russian parliament) in October 1993, which was the prelude to establishing an authoritarian presidential system, the CPRF gained a virtual monopoly on the left wing of the new party system. In exchange, the party submitted itself to a tacit rule: no matter how many votes they won, the communists should not threaten the country’s strategic direction. In particular, this meant dropping their opposition to further privatisation and to the construction of a market economy. By channelling discontent, they contributed to the country’s stability for a long time.

The largest activist base

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the CPRF remained the party with the largest activist base (500,000 members at its peak) and the only one that could mobilise tens of thousands of demonstrators. Its members’ enthusiasm meant it could run successful election campaigns despite limited finances and almost no access to television. The party came first in the 1995 Duma election and in 1996 Zyuganov reached the second round of the presidential election, only narrowly losing to Boris Yeltsin. Though this election was marked by significant manipulation, the communists recognised the result.

After Putin came to power in 2000, Russia’s political system became progressively harsher and the Kremlin was increasingly unwilling to tolerate the CPRF’s success and relative autonomy. The presidential administration forced communist leaders to expel all radical elements and exerted greater financial control over them. Whereas in the early 2000s, membership fees had contributed over half the party’s income, that figure had fallen to just 6% by 2015. State funding, meanwhile, accounted for 89%.

The docility with which the CPRF fulfilled its role as a ‘constructive’ opposition led to it losing members (only 160,000 remained by 2016) and losing at the ballot box. It found itself torn between the obligation to remain loyal to the Kremlin and the need for new supporters. In 2011, although it suffered most from ballot box stuffing, the Communist Party stayed away from demonstrations against electoral fraud, leaving the liberal opposition to carry the torch for public freedom.

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In the March 2018 presidential election, however, the CPRF took a first serious step towards electoral challenge. It put up as its candidate Pavel Grudinin, an entrepreneur at the head of a privatised former sovkhoz (state-owned farm), whose rhetoric departed from the usual communist tropes. Grudinin, virtually unknown to the general public, focused on current social problems, not the achievements of the Soviet past.

Despite calls from the ‘non-systemic’ opposition figure Alexei Navalny to boycott the election (in which he was barred from standing), Grudinin came second in the first round with 11.7% of the vote (8.6 million) — an achievement in a presidential election traditionally dominated by Putin. This result inspired Navalny to change tack and launch ‘smart voting’ in autumn 2018. Navalny asked his supporters to vote for the candidates best placed to beat United Russia (which generally meant the communists).

This change came hard on the heels of demonstrations in summer 2018 against the government’s decision to raise the retirement age. The measure was so unpopular it strengthened the opposition, especially the communists. In September 2018 the CPRF won elections in the Irkutsk and Khakassia regions and in some cities in the Ulyanovsk and Samara regions. It kept up this momentum in autumn 2019, taking a third of the seats in the Moscow city parliament (13 out of 45 seats).

Changing electoral map

A paradoxical situation was becoming apparent: some of the liberal urban middle class had started voting against their own principles and ideological inclinations. The electoral map of CPRF support was changing. Whereas in the 1990s and 2000s, the Communist Party’s voters came mainly from Russia’s agricultural south, they were by the end of the decade mainly in industrialised regions and in the big cities. In the most recent parliamentary election in September 2021, the CPRF won many votes in Yekaterinburg, Irkutsk, Khabarovsk and Chelyabinsk, although none of these cities of several million inhabitants belonged to the ‘red belt’ of the 1990s. In Moscow and St Petersburg, traditionally more liberal than elsewhere, the CPRF won 22% and 17.9% of the vote respectively, while the liberal opposition Yabloko Party suffered a crushing defeat. The Communist Party was clearly outstripping the rest of the opposition: it was more than 10% ahead of Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, with which it had been on a par in the 2016 parliamentary election (at around 13%).

Ideologically unchanged

Despite its new support base, the party has not changed significantly in ideology or structure. Its official manifesto still bears the imprint of Stalinism, nationalism and the defence of a paternalistic welfare state in the spirit of the final years of the USSR. In it, the party states its attachment to ‘the dynamic Marxist-Leninist doctrine’, adding that ‘with the restoration of capitalism, the Russian question has become extremely acute’, condemning the ‘genocide of a great nation’ and asserting the need to protect Russian civilisation from the assault of the materialist, soulless West.

In keeping with this, the Communist parliamentary group has even been an active supporter of the aggression against Ukraine: on 19 January, as Russian troops held manoeuvres on the border and Western leaders kept up their dialogue with Putin, 11 Communist MPs, including Zyuganov, put forward a resolution in the Duma calling on Putin to recognise the independence of the ‘people’s republics’ of eastern Ukraine and end the ‘genocide’ of their people.

This demand was tantamount to ending negotiations on the Minsk agreements (which recognised Donetsk and Luhansk as part of Ukraine) and immediately starting a military conflict. At first, United Russia, which holds a parliamentary majority, did not back it, on the grounds that it was too radical. But it was this motion, approved by an absolute majority in parliament a month later, which later served as the basis for the invasion.

On the first day of the war, the Communist Party put out an official statement affirming its full support for Putin’s policy on Ukraine, carefully avoiding the words ‘war’ and ‘military operations’. This statement echoed the official rhetoric on the need to ‘demilitarise and de-nazify’ Ukraine and asserted the urgency of countering the plans of the ‘United States and its NATO satellites to enslave Ukraine’. In a further statement on 12 April, six weeks into the war, the CPRF described Ukraine as the ‘world centre of neo-Nazism’ and called for ‘the mobilisation of Russia’s spiritual and economic resources to repel liberal fascism’, establishing a state of emergency and strict public regulation of the economy given the confrontation with the West.

Even so, the only three Russian MPs with the courage to publicly criticise the invasion of Ukraine also belong to the communist group. One of them, Oleg Smolin, respected for his long-standing fight against the privatisation of education, said early in the war, ‘Military force should be used in politics only as a last resort. All the military experts tell us that large-scale military action in Ukraine would be far from straightforward. I feel sadness over all those human lives, ours and others.’

Vyacheslav Markhayev, who represents Buryatia, also spoke out strongly against the war, saying that ‘the whole campaign for the recognition of the DNR [Donetsk People’s Republic] and LNR [Luhansk People’s Republic] had a hidden agenda … very different [from the original plan put forward by the Communist MPs] … And here we are in full-scale war between two states.’ More soldiers from the oblast he represents in Siberia have been killed in action than from any other since military operations began.

Several local CPRF representatives from the regions of Voronezh, Vladivostok, the Komi Republic and Yakutia have also taken a stand against the war. One of the most talented representatives of the party’s younger generation, Moscow city councillor Yevgeny Stupin, co-founded a leftwing anti-war coalition that brings together several political groups unrepresented in the Duma. For these activists, openly coming out against the war means defying the CPRF leadership’s line and being prepared to leave its ranks. Several of them were expelled even before they could hand in their cards.

Other organisations to the left of the CPRF have taken an active part in peace protests. The Russian Socialist Movement (which has links with France’s New Anticapitalist Party) issued a joint statement with the Ukrainian left Sotsіalniy Rukh (Social Movement), a rare Russian-Ukrainian initiative. The statement condemns Russia’s criminal and imperialist war and supports all measures aimed at ending the conflict, including sanctions on oil and gas and supplying weapons to Ukraine for self-defence. This statement is especially significant as the Ukrainian security services have been targeting the domestic left, which they suspect of being unpatriotic. Russian anarchists in Avtonomnoe Deistvie (Autonomous Action) have called on ‘Russian soldiers to desert, disobey criminal orders and leave Ukraine immediately’.

The war with Ukraine has only confirmed the division between those nostalgic for the era of USSR’s state power and those for whom being on the left means a commitment to a democratic, anti-authoritarian and forward-looking project. Today, when any call to resist imperialist aggression by the Russian government risks repression and hostility from the rest of society, the anti-war left looks isolated. But it’s worth remembering that in 1917, during the first world war, those who called on Russian soldiers to disobey their officers’ orders, against all expectations, came to power. And set Ukraine’s current internationally recognised borders — yet another reason for Putin to hate Lenin.

…………………….

[Ilya Budraitskis is an essayist and political theorist who teaches at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences and the Institute of Contemporary Art Moscow. He is the author of Dissidents among dissidents: Ideology, politics and the Left in post-Soviet Russia, Verso, London, 2022.]

Russia’s Communist Party – Ukraine War Statement – Gennady Zyuganov

Statement by the Chairman of the CC CPRF Gennady Zyuganov

The situation in the zone of hostilities in Ukraine has recently seen a dramatic change. The terrorist acts on the Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline, on the Crimea bridge and daily shelling of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant show that the globalists would not stop at anything in order to destabilize our country. What we see today is not a special operation, but a war of the USA and its allies against Russia with the hands of Bandera Fascists. 

The Western countries are providing Ukraine’s criminal regime with the latest weaponry. They are funding and training units of Ukrainian armed forces that are being formed. Their headquarters plan and control the operations of the Neo-Nazi soldiery and provide them with intelligence information. They set the targets of the strikes at Russian troops, cities and villages.

NATO experts man the control systems of precision weapons. Thousands of mercenaries are directly involved in combat. The USA and its satellites are practically financing the Bandera regime in Ukraine. As part of modern hybrid warfare they are waging an information, propaganda and economic war against Russia. The recent terrorist acts have undoubtedly been organized by American and British special services which have long been specializing in this kind of crimes.

Undisguised entry of NATO into the war against Russia is a game changer which calls for a change of the strategy and tactics of the leadership of the state and the army, and the gearing of the entire country toward ensuring victory. Considering that the LPR and DPR, as well as the Kherson and Zaporozhye oblasts, are now parts of Russia today we are fighting not in Ukraine, but on our own territory. That, too, is a new phenomenon. But we should understand that the task of liberating the people of Ukraine from the Neo-Nazi regime is still on the agenda. 

The Russian armed forces are up against major challenges. However, it would be totally wrong to put all the blame for these problems on the current leadership of the Armed Forces. They deserve every kind of support and help. It is incumbent upon us to give an objective and stern assessment of those who have over many years been undermining Russia’s defense capability.

The defense industry and science have been dramatically wakened. Thoughtless and sometimes downright subversive privatization has led to the liquidation of many strategic enterprises. Incidentally, the process of deliberate bankruptcies continues to this day.

Society has been forced to assume the solution of many supply problems faced by the fighting army. All honor and praise to the millions of patriots in all the corners of our land who have undertaken to purchase and deliver to the army various equipment, food, clothing, night vision instruments, UAVs, drugs and medical equipment. Yet all this is the duty of the state and its relevant bodies. In 1941-1945, too, there was a flow of parcels to Red Army soldiers from the rear of the country. But the state fully supplied all the army needed.

The recent years have seen a number of measures to rebuild the Armed Forces and the defense industry. However, the damage caused by the liberal “reformers” and “the fifth column” has been so great that it would take years to make up for it. Society expects that those who are to blame for the current serious problems of our army and have treacherously undermined its defense capability will be severely punished. 

Public opinion makers have gravely damaged Russia’s combat readiness. Years of pursuing the course for suppressing patriotism, foisting Western “values” that are alien to our people as well as fraudulent elections were bound to entail dire consequences, as witnessed by thousands of young men dodging draft. The blame lies not only with them but also with those who have deliberately been turning our youth into rootless cosmopolitans. 

Intensification of hostilities, NATO openly joining the war against Russia have revealed the existence of forces which, wittingly or unwittingly, impede the solution of the problems facing our country and army. Part of the bureaucracy, especially in the economic and financial spheres, is behaving with such unconcern as if there were no special military operation, as if this operation has not developed into NATO’s war against Russia. This is beginning to look like sabotage. Urgent legislation needs to be taken to punish those responsible for this, including for inaction of public office holders at a time when urgent crucial decisions need to be taken.

Amid growing military threat to the country the unity of society is vital. It is not the army but the whole country that is at war. Each and every one today must take on board the slogan of our great ancestors: “Everything for the front, everything for victory.” However, genuine consolidation of the social forces can only be achieved through a change of course for one that is socially oriented. Justice, collectivism and mutual help are the cornerstones of our society. It is necessary to immediately introduce a progressive taxation scheme and repeal the decision to raise the retirement age.

The battle should be waged not only against external enemies, but also against internal enemies of Russia, the management crisis, economic lag, widespread impoverishment, and an appalling social split. Criminal greed and thievish irresponsibility of the oligarchy. Against Russophobic and anti-Soviet intrigues of “the fifth column” in the sphere of culture, education and propaganda. In the 20th century this battle was brilliantly won by the Soviet Power which accomplished Leninist-Stalinist modernization within the shortest possible time. Putting an end to exploitation, joblessness and illiteracy. Rapidly industrializing the economy. Outstanding peaceful accomplishments of socialism provided the foundation of our victory over Hitler’s brown plague. It is high time to understand the meaning of this historical lesson and realize that new victories can only be won by changing the course in favor of socialism, justice, equality and genuine responsibility of power and the citizens for their country.

Nationalization of strategic spheres of the economy, maximum support for its innovation-driven development, dissemination of the experience of people’s enterprises, social protection of the citizens, free and high-quality medical care and education – this is the foundation of our initiatives and proposals. This is the program of victory which needs to be adopted at the state level. Without it, it is impossible to administer a crushing rebuff to those who seek to destroy the Russian World and wipe the state born of it off the face of the Earth. In the conditions when the country has arisen to defend its sovereignty and independence, when hundreds of thousands of young men are going to the front, everyone must do one’s utmost to defeat Neo-Nazism and Bandera followers who have the backing of the USA and its NATO satellites. 

The CPRF and the patriotic left in Russia are confident of winning the battle against the same enemy that came to us in June 1941, that is, the united forces of the aggressive West. Back then these forces were led by Hitler’s Germany. Today it is the USA, Great Britain and their vassals. If this struggle is to be successful, there needs to be a total concentration of all our resources and spiritual strength. The Russian leadership must take all the measures that it calls for.

Chairman of the CC CPRF                                                   

Gennady Zyuganov

One Hour of Russian Post-Soviet Communist Music – Audio Mp3

Québec: Il faut l’indépendance et le socialisme ! (République ovrièr) Automne 2022

Crise sociale et impasse nationale

Il faut l’indépendance et le socialisme !

pas Québec solidaire

Le cirque électoral qui s’installe au Québec cet automne se déroule alors que la crise mondiale du capitalisme provoquée par la pandémie de COVID-19 et la guerre en Ukraine s’abat de plein fouet sur la classe ouvrière. Les travailleurs font face à l’inflation galopante et la baisse de leurs salaires réels, à la décrépitude toujours plus grande des services publics, à la crise du logement, et au recul généralisé des conditions de travail et de vie, en particulier celles des femmes. Pendant ce temps, les clowns de toutes les couleurs — orange, rouge, bleu poudre ou foncé — rivalisent de tours de jonglerie avec des milliards qu’ils font sortir de leur chapeau et promettent d’investir ici ou là. Rien ne distingue cependant entre eux les partis qui se présentent aux élections sur ces problèmes fondamentaux qui s’abattent sur la classe ouvrière. Tous sont d’accord sur la nécessité de bouger quelques chiffres dans les colonnes du budget tout en laissant intact ce qui se trouve à la source même de ces problèmes : le système capitaliste et la domination de classe de la bourgeoisie. Aucune des questions vitales pour les travailleurs ne sera résolue dans le contexte de ces élections.

Vingt-sept ans après l’échec du dernier référendum, la « question des élections » semble en fait porter sur « quel nationalisme pour le Québec maintenant que l’indépendance n’est plus à l’ordre du jour ? » Le tour de force de la CAQ de Legault, c’est justement d’avoir recentré tout le débat sur la question nationale en évacuant complètement l’indépendance. Face au déclin du Parti québécois et du Parti libéral, l’« alternative » présentée aux élections c’est d’un côté le nationalisme « autonomiste » de la CAQ qui veut qu’on reste prisonnier de la Confédération canadienne, de l’autre côté le nationalisme soi-disant « progressiste » de Québec solidaire qui espère composter les restants du PQ pour nous resservir la même recette ayant conduit la lutte de libération nationale à l’échec, arrosée à la sauce « écolo » du jour. Dans un cas comme dans l’autre, la libération nationale du Québec se trouve dans l’impasse.

C’est précisément parce que les aspirations sociales et nationales des travailleurs ont constamment été enchaînées aux partis de la bourgeoisie québécoise que l’on se retrouve dans la crise sociale et l’impasse nationale actuelles. La dernière chose dont les travailleurs et les opprimés ont besoin, c’est de demeurer subordonnés à cette bourgeoisie à travers l’un ou l’autre de ses partis qui ne diffèrent entre eux que sur comment mieux servir le capital. Élections 2022 : aucun vote pour QS, la CAQ, le PQ, les libéraux ou les conservateurs !

La seule voie pour sortir de la crise sociale et de l’impasse nationale, c’est que la classe ouvrière mène une lutte contre la politique de tous ces partis. La pandémie a démontré encore plus clairement que le capitalisme pourrissant n’est pas capable de répondre aux besoins les plus élémentaires de la population. Pour même commencer à satisfaire ces besoins en santé, en éducation, pour du logement et des conditions de vie décentes, il faut une réorganisation fondamentale de la société, chasser les capitalistes et instaurer un gouvernement ouvrier par une révolution socialiste. Quant à l’indépendance, la bourgeoisie du Québec se complaît entièrement dans sa position subalterne aux impérialistes canadiens, du moment qu’elle peut tirer un maximum de profits en exploitant sauvagement « son » prolétariat. Que ce soit pour résoudre la question sociale ou la question nationale, les travailleurs doivent lutter pour une république ouvrière du Québec !

Pandémie et trahison

La bourgeoisie québécoise a répondu à la pandémie de COVID-19 de la façon qui servait le mieux ses intérêts : enfermer tout le monde à la maison pendant des mois pour essayer de freiner la propagation du virus mauvais pour sa business, et pour éviter au moindre coût possible l’effondrement total du système de santé déjà au bord du gouffre. La toile de fond immédiate pour la crise sociale qui n’en finit plus, c’est précisément cette réponse de la bourgeoisie à la pandémie de COVID-19 et la trahison colossale des directions actuelles de la classe ouvrière pour l’avoir soutenue. Pertes d’emplois massives, détérioration drastique des conditions de travail, affaiblissement des syndicats, renforcement de l’oppression des femmes, etc., tous les problèmes qui continuent de s’abattre sur la classe ouvrière ont été horriblement exacerbés par les confinements. Les travailleurs regardent ces deux dernières années de pandémie et savent à quel point ces mesures étaient inhumaines. Mais en même temps, beaucoup se disent toujours « qu’il fallait bien faire quelque chose » ou « qu’on n’avait pas d’autre choix que les confinements ».

C’est que pendant plus de deux ans, le gouvernement a fait avaler aux travailleurs le chantage moral que les confinements sont nécessaires pour « sauver des vies » et qu’il faut tous s’unir derrière la classe dirigeante au nom d’un concept universel et transclasse de la « santé publique ». Non ! L’alternative à la gestion catastrophique de la pandémie par la bourgeoisie, c’était de s’attaquer aux racines de la crise qui se trouvent dans la domination capitaliste et sortir du cadre de la propriété privée, de la production pour le profit, des attaques d’austérité contre les services publics, du logement subordonné aux intérêts des magnats immobiliers, etc. Pour protéger la santé des travailleurs et celle de leurs proches contre la menace d’un virus mortel, il fallait des grèves et des mobilisations pour plus de soins de santé, plus d’éducation, pour le contrôle syndical de la santé et de la sécurité, pour des conditions de travail que les travailleurs eux-mêmes considèrent sécuritaires : autant de choses pour lesquelles il est impossible de lutter en restant enfermé, isolé chez soi et ligoté par « l’unité nationale » avec les patrons et leur gouvernement, contre qui toutes ces demandes sont forcément dirigées. S’opposer aux confinements, qui ont affaibli en tout point la capacité de lutte de la classe ouvrière, c’était le point de départ nécessaire pour monter une réponse prolétarienne et révolutionnaire à la crise.

C’est grâce au soutien indéfectible des bureaucraties syndicales traîtresses que la bourgeoisie a pu imposer ses mesures réactionnaires et dévastatrices. Que ce soient les chefs de la FTQ, CSN, ou CSQ, toutes les directions syndicales se sont ralliées derrière « papa Legault », le drapeau québécois et le déluge d’unité nationale, laissant la classe ouvrière complètement désarmée face aux attaques dévastatrices de la bourgeoisie. En raison de l’oppression nationale du Québec, il est toujours plus facile pour la bourgeoisie ici et ses lieutenants ouvriers de faire passer ses intérêts de classe pour ceux de toute la nation : Il faut se tenir « tous ensemble, nous les Québécois » et se rallier derrière l’« État québécois » (en réalité une province de l’État canadien administrée dans l’intérêt de la bourgeoisie québécoise). Foutaise ! La pandémie a juste illustré, de façon encore plus frappante, que le nationalisme bourgeois mène à la trahison totale des intérêts des travailleurs et que la seule façon de faire avancer ces intérêts, c’est en luttant contre la bourgeoisie québécoise, pas en s’unissant derrière elle.

C’est dans les périodes de crise comme celle de la COVID-19, lorsque les contradictions entre les intérêts de la classe ouvrière et ceux de la bourgeoisie sont exacerbées, que les patrons ont d’autant plus besoin de l’unité nationale. C’est donc sans surprise que tous les partis présents à l’Assemblée nationale se sont unis derrière Legault tout au long de la pandémie, laissant de côté leurs différences secondaires pour s’unir autour de leur devoir premier et commun : servir « l’intérêt national ». Ceux qui, à la veille du scrutin du 3 octobre, pensent que QS ferait les choses vraiment différemment de la CAQ n’ont qu’à bien se rappeler que QS a totalement soutenu le gouvernement Legault tout au long de la pandémie. Les quelques critiques sporadiques de Nadeau-Dubois sur le caractère « antidémocratique » de certaines mesures de Legault ne trompent personne quant au fait que, sur les questions de fond, QS était entièrement à l’unisson avec le gouvernement sur la nécessité d’imposer les confinements et de réprimer la classe ouvrière. Il y a eu une crise, et ce parti a démontré on ne peut plus clairement qu’il est tout aussi au service de la bourgeoisie québécoise que la CAQ, les libéraux ou le PQ.

Profitant de l’unité nationale autour des confinements et du soutien unanime à Legault, les conservateurs d’Éric Duhaime sont les seuls à avoir tiré leur épingle du jeu pendant la pandémie, créant un nouveau parti bourgeois pratiquement sur la seule base de leur opposition aux confinements. Duhaime canalise maintenant une bonne part de la colère accumulée contre la réponse du gouvernement à la pandémie derrière son programme libertarien réactionnaire. Mais les conservateurs ne sont pas plus une alternative pour la classe ouvrière, et la supposée « liberté » dont ils parlent, ce n’est que la liberté des capitalistes d’exploiter les travailleurs sans entraves gouvernementales, « à la Margaret Thatcher ».

Ce qu’il fallait tout au long de la pandémie c’est une opposition communiste aux gouvernements pour canaliser la colère légitime contre les mesures sanitaires dans une direction prolétarienne et révolutionnaire. Mis à part la Ligue trotskyste, les autres groupes se réclamant du marxisme au Québec ont tous soutenu les confinements et demandé à ce qu’ils soient plus longs et plus durs, portant leur part de responsabilité pour cette trahison de la classe ouvrière. Le résultat désastreux de leur programme politique c’est d’avoir laissé des forces bourgeoises et réactionnaires comme le Parti conservateur se présenter comme les seuls opposants aux mesures sanitaires, tout en ralliant la majorité de la classe ouvrière derrière les gouvernements et leur campagne d’unité nationale (voir notre article sur les manifestations des camionneurs en page 3).

Poser clairement une alternative révolutionnaire contre les principaux partis bourgeois au Québec est encore la tâche centrale pour les marxistes ici ; la pandémie a simplement démontré on ne peut plus clairement que les groupes réformistes ne sont pas à la hauteur de la tâche et ne sont que des larbins de la bourgeoisie.

La CAQ : fédéraliste, xénophobe et anti-ouvrière

Avec sa défense des « valeurs québécoises », beaucoup de travailleurs croient que la Coalition avenir Québec de François Legault peut à tout le moins défendre leurs droits nationaux et tenir tête au gouvernement fédéral oppresseur à Ottawa. Mais les ritournelles de Legault sur la « fierté québécoise » sont un show de boucane : la CAQ est contre l’indépendance. Son programme « autonomiste » est un programme fédéraliste pour maintenir le statut de province du Québec dans le cadre oppressif et assimilationniste du Canada.

Même les mesures de défense du français contenues dans sa loi 96 et les modestes pouvoirs en immigration que Legault réclame du fédéral, bien que généralement soutenables, ne règlent pas d’un iota l’oppression nationale du Québec. La loi 96 n’est qu’une pathétique caricature de la loi 101, qui elle-même n’a jamais réglé l’oppression linguistique des Québécois malgré de réelles avancées. Et le Québec peut bien essayer de grappiller tous les pouvoirs en immigration qu’il souhaite, le contrôle des frontières est un attribut indissociable de la souveraineté et ne pourra être acquis par le Québec qu’en se séparant du Canada. À vrai dire, même les quelques pouvoirs en immigration que le Québec a pu arracher jusqu’à aujourd’hui ont été obtenus comme concessions du fédéral parce que celui-ci craignait l’indépendance : soit vous les accordez, soit on se sépare. Les arguments de Legault sur la nécessité de lui donner « une forte majorité » pour faire contrepoids à Trudeau sont du poisson pourri. Peu importe le nombre de caquistes élus, la CAQ n’a aucun rapport de force contre Ottawa parce qu’ils sont absolument dédiés au maintien du Québec dans la Confédération. Trudeau peut cracher au visage des Québécois autant qu’il voudra avec ce programme fédéraliste. C’est simple : la seule façon de mettre fin à tous les aspects de l’oppression nationale des Québécois (pas juste la langue et les frontières), c’est par l’indépendance… le rejet de laquelle se trouve à l’origine et aux fondements mêmes de la CAQ.

Avec son rejet de l’indépendance, la seule carte que Legault peut abattre pour canaliser les aspirations nationales des travailleurs québécois c’est son nationalisme conservateur et réactionnaire « de survivance » qu’il ne peut affirmer autrement que par ses attaques racistes contre les minorités et les musulmans en particulier. Un tel nationalisme n’est pas sans rappeler l’époque d’avant la Révolution tranquille quand les Québécois se faisaient marteler « les valeurs » de repli sur soi, xénophobes et anti-femmes par le clergé catholique et la bourgeoisie québécoise qui se satisfaisait pleinement de son rôle de sous-fifre administrant une province pour le compte de la bourgeoisie anglo-canadienne. Le seul objectif du nationalisme identitaire de Legault c’est de diviser et d’affaiblir la classe ouvrière multiethnique, permettant à la bourgeoisie de mieux faire passer ses attaques sur la classe ouvrière et de l’exploiter davantage.

La loi 21 est une attaque raciste pure et simple contre les femmes musulmanes. Sous prétexte frauduleux de défense de la laïcité (qui au Québec devrait en fait signifier la séparation complète de l’État et de l’Église catholique dominante), toute cette loi est faite de manière à viser spécifiquement les femmes voilées, déjà souvent au bas de la société, et à les marginaliser encore davantage en leur barrant les emplois d’enseignante et dans les CPE. L’interdiction de services dans d’autres langues que le français pour les immigrants après six mois, contenue dans la loi 96, est faite du même tissu raciste : une telle mesure fait obstacle en réalité à la transition des immigrants entre leur langue maternelle et le français et les marginalise encore davantage. De telles politiques sapent la lutte pour la libération nationale en divisant les travailleurs, enchaînant davantage les Québécois « de souche » à leur propre bourgeoisie et rejetant les immigrants dans les bras du multiculturalisme trudeauiste anti-Québec. Appuyer la CAQ est suicidaire pour la classe ouvrière !

Impasse solidaire

Contre la CAQ, virtuellement toute la gauche au Québec s’affaire à construire Québec solidaire, une alternative qui mène tout autant à la défaite pour la classe ouvrière. Appelant à un nouveau « projet de société » pour combattre le « néolibéralisme » et à renouer avec le « modèle québécois », QS puise dans les illusions dans le soi-disant « État-providence » issu de la Révolution tranquille pour faire contrepoids à la CAQ avec son propre nationalisme « progressiste ». Nonobstant sa position pour l’indépendance, le principal attrait de QS pour beaucoup de ses supporters c’est qu’il promet certaines réformes qui amélioreraient un tant soit peu les conditions de vie : investissements en santé et en éducation, 50 000 logements sociaux, assurance dentaire, salaire minimum à 18 $, etc.

Mais arrimer la lutte pour l’amélioration immédiate des conditions de vie au véhicule de QS garantit que cette lutte ira droit dans le mur. Toute avancée de la classe ouvrière, même les réformes les plus partielles et réversibles, se frappe nécessairement aux intérêts de la classe capitaliste et ne peut être arrachée qu’en opposition à celle-ci. Financer adéquatement les services publics ? Mais il faut alors confronter les patrons, leurs profits, leurs chambres de commerce qui vous répondront cordialement de « manger un char… » du moment que vous voulez piger dans leurs poches. Construire des logements abordables et de qualité ? Mais il faut encore des sommes colossales, confronter tous ces promoteurs immobiliers qui veulent construire le plus cheap possible et les gros propriétaires qui veulent tous engranger un maximum de profits. Améliorer les conditions de travail, hausser les salaires, assurer des emplois bien rémunérés à tous et aux femmes en particulier, etc. : tout ce qui est nécessaire immédiatement pour la classe ouvrière se heurte à des intérêts capitalistes profondément ancrés.

C’est simple : les intérêts des travailleurs et ceux de la bourgeoisie sont diamétralement opposés et absolument irréconciliables. Avancer les intérêts des travailleurs requiert par définition d’aller à l’encontre de ceux des capitalistes et ne peut donc se faire que par une lutte tout aussi irréconciliable contre eux. À l’inverse, tout le programme de QS est basé sur le mensonge qu’il est possible de concilier ces intérêts en administrant l’État — l’outil de la bourgeoisie pour maintenir sa domination de classe — dans l’intérêt de « tous les Québécois », ces messieurs les Péladeau et Molson comme les travailleurs et travailleuses. QS n’a aucune prétention de lutter pour le socialisme, ou de s’attaquer directement à la propriété privée de la bourgeoisie ; il pense au contraire pouvoir convaincre les patrons d’ici qu’un « meilleur compromis », qui donnerait un visage plus humain au capitalisme en mettant quelques pansements ici et là, serait dans leur intérêt.

Ce programme n’est pas un « moindre mal », mais constitue un obstacle à la mobilisation indépendante du prolétariat contre la bourgeoisie, la seule façon de faire avancer ses intérêts fondamentaux. D’ailleurs, la classe ouvrière québécoise devrait se souvenir comment se termine le film intitulé « Collaboration de classe » : le PQ aussi parlait de « projet de société » et se disait avoir un « préjugé favorable » aux travailleurs, ce qui ne l’a pas empêché d’être un parti de la bourgeoisie québécoise qui a écrasé les aspirations des travailleurs. Le remake que propose QS aujourd’hui n’est pas plus original, et certainement pas meilleur.

Autre exemple plus récent, en Grèce, l’expérience de Syriza a bien démontré le cul-de-sac où mènent de tels partis bourgeois « progressistes » au gouvernement. Syriza promettait lui aussi de redonner quelque souveraineté au peuple grec, saigné à blanc par les impérialistes de l’Union européenne (UE), et d’améliorer ses conditions de vie en mettant fin à l’austérité imposée par Berlin et Paris. Mais contre la volonté des masses grecques exprimée lors du référendum de juillet 2015 contre le plan d’austérité de l’UE, Syriza a continué d’organiser le pillage du pays et la destruction du niveau de vie des Grecs en imposant les diktats des impérialistes de l’UE. Pourquoi ? Parce que c’était la seule voie possible sur la base de son programme procapitaliste. Pour faire face aux impérialistes de l’UE, il fallait s’appuyer sur la mobilisation de la classe ouvrière et de ses comités d’action pour annuler la dette, prendre possession des banques, des ports et des industries, bref autant d’éléments de programme en contradiction directe avec le programme de Syriza basé sur la sainteté de la propriété privée et de l’État bourgeois. « Tenir tête » aux impérialistes appelait nécessairement à briser les limites du cadre capitaliste. Avec un programme fondé entièrement sur le respect de ces limites, tout ce qui restait comme option pour Syriza c’était d’imposer aux travailleurs grecs la ligne que les capitalistes avaient tracée dans le sable et de réprimer toute contestation pour la franchir.

QS, pour sa part, ne ferait rien de différent par rapport à Syriza et remplirait exactement le même rôle pour le compte de la bourgeoisie québécoise ici. Si cette dernière décidait de se ranger derrière QS et de le porter au pouvoir, ce ne serait que pour mieux désarmer les travailleurs et toute contestation sociale, les rallier derrière ce véhicule bourgeois et mieux faire passer ses attaques par la suite.

La gauche encastrée dans QS

La gauche qui se réclame du socialisme au Québec est bien consciente de la trahison qu’a imposée Syriza aux travailleurs. C’est qu’elle est bien placée pour le savoir : les camarades grecs de La Riposte « socialiste », par exemple, ont construit Syriza et lié les travailleurs à ce parti bourgeois pendant des années ! Loin de tirer les leçons de cette « expérience », c’est exactement la même chose qu’ils reproduisent ici en construisant QS, une trahison de classe pure et simple.

La Riposte rétorquera que pour éviter une éventuelle trahison de la part de QS, il suffirait de « maintenir la pression » sur le parti pour qu’il demeure fidèle à son programme « progressiste ». C’est dans cet esprit que les membres de La Riposte (ou des membres de QS qui s’identifient comme La Riposte, c’est la même chose) affirment dans leur manifeste de campagne dans QS qu’ils sont « de plus en plus alarmés par ce que nous croyons être une dérive importante des racines radicales de notre parti », ajoutant que : « Nous devons revenir aux traditions anticapitalistes de notre parti et renouer avec les traditions socialistes de la gauche québécoise. » (« Manifeste : Pour un Québec solidaire, luttons pour le socialisme », marxiste.qc.ca, 2021). C’est le même son de cloche fondamentalement du côté d’Alternative socialiste qui ne diffère en rien de La Riposte dans son désir de voir fleurir Québec solidaire.

Aucune pression ne pourra jamais changer la nature capitaliste de QS. Pour ces groupes, le programme procapitaliste de QS s’explique par des questions organisationnelles ou conjoncturelles : la chefferie, les « instances », le « manque de vision » de QS, etc. Si seulement on fait assez pression sur la direction, alors le parti sera poussé plus à gauche. Mais la politique n’est pas une question de mots ou de « bonne volonté », mais de forces sociales et de programmes représentant des intérêts de classes antagonistes : dans la société capitaliste divisée en classes, un parti ne peut pas représenter en même temps les intérêts de la bourgeoisie et du prolétariat. Le programme procapitaliste de QS, c’est la nature même de ce parti.

Issu de la fusion de la gauche petite-bourgeoise « communautaire » d’Option citoyenne et d’un ramassis de divers groupes pseudo-marxistes, QS est un parti purement bourgeois qui n’a aucun lien organique avec le mouvement ouvrier, une sorte de version laïque de la démocratie chrétienne (comme le faisait remarquer Pierre Falardeau au sujet d’Option citoyenne). Tant que le parti demeurait marginal, celui-ci pouvait bien inscrire à son programme n’importe quel verbiage pour laisser ces pseudo-marxistes désillusionnés se convaincre qu’ils font encore partie d’un mouvement « anticapitaliste ». Maintenant que le parti aspire à prendre les rênes du gouvernement à Québec, c’est tout naturellement qu’il délaisse ses phrases à consonance trop « radicale » pour prouver à la bourgeoisie québécoise qu’il est respectable et pourrait mieux faire le travail que Legault.

Il faut être absolument cynique, ou dans le meilleur des cas un sot, mais certainement pas un marxiste, pour argumenter comme ces membres de La Riposte ou d’Alternative socialiste qu’il faut être « proche » des « gens de gauche » et les encourager à se « conscientiser » en participant au « projet progressiste » de QS, sur la base duquel on pourra un jour construire un vrai parti socialiste. Non ! La seule position marxiste conséquente, c’est une lutte impitoyable contre QS pour briser cet obstacle à la mobilisation indépendante du prolétariat, à la construction d’un parti révolutionnaire et au socialisme. Voilà ce pour quoi ne lutteront jamais La Riposte et Alternative socialiste, l’unité avec le reste de la petite-bourgeoisie bien-pensante de QS étant la chose la plus précieuse au monde dans leur cœur esseulé d’opportunistes invétérés.

Pour un programme révolutionnaire !

Les travailleurs ayant une conscience de classe et les jeunes qui veulent lutter pour la libération nationale et sociale doivent dès maintenant consolider un pôle révolutionnaire autour d’un programme clair. La Ligue trotskyste est la seule aujourd’hui à mettre de l’avant ces éléments de programme fondamentaux : une lutte acharnée pour faire rompre le prolétariat des principaux partis nationalistes, et une perspective de lutte partant des besoins les plus immédiats de la classe ouvrière liée avec la république ouvrière du Québec pour réaliser la libération nationale et sociale. Voici des positions clés qui doivent dès maintenant être portées dans tous les milieux de travail et sur la base desquelles forger une opposition communiste dans les syndicats :

• Aucun soutien à la CAQ, au PQ, à QS et aux autres partis de la bourgeoisie ! La condition préalable pour faire avancer les intérêts de la classe ouvrière, c’est qu’elle lutte absolument indépendamment de toutes les forces bourgeoises et de celles qui voudraient maintenir l’unité avec elle. Pour un parti ouvrier révolutionnaire !
• À bas l’impérialisme et l’oppression nationale ! Pour l’indépendance du Québec ! La bourgeoisie québécoise est prête à faire l’indépendance seulement si les impérialistes américains sont d’accord et si ses propres intérêts économiques sont garantis : au moindre obstacle, elle capitule. S’allier avec elle est suicidaire ; il faut compter uniquement sur la classe ouvrière, y compris les travailleurs anglophones d’Amérique du Nord, pour avancer la lutte de libération nationale.
• Investissements massifs en santé, en éducation et dans tous les services publics ! Pour un programme massif d’embauche dans les services publics sous le contrôle syndical ! 30 heures de travail payées comme 40 pour répartir le travail entre toutes les mains disponibles ! Construction de nouveaux hôpitaux, de nouvelles écoles, de maisons de retraite de qualité et d’autres infrastructures dans le cadre d’une économie planifiée. Lier ces luttes au programme de QS et ses suiveux pour « taxer les riches » c’est déclarer forfait en partant.
• Logements de qualité abordables pour tous ! Saisie immédiate des maisons et logements spacieux de la bourgeoisie, des tours à bureaux, des propriétés de la Couronne et des bâtisses sous-utilisées de l’Église catholique ! Programme de construction massif sous contrôle ouvrier et expropriation sans compensation des grands propriétaires, des géants immobiliers et des grandes compagnies de construction par une république ouvrière !
• Reforgeons la Quatrième Internationale ! Sans parti révolutionnaire internationaliste, impossible pour le prolétariat ici de contrer les pressions nationalistes à la collaboration de classe et de conserver son indépendance politique. La lutte pour la construction d’une direction révolutionnaire au Québec et au Canada est indissociable du combat pour reforger la Quatrième Internationale, parti de la révolution socialiste mondiale.

………………….

Source

Superman Reboots America – by Larry Romanoff – 18 Oct 2022

 • 800 WORDS •

In June of 2014, the National Post carried an article by Ira Wells, titled ‘America through the lens of its superheroes‘, which presented some insightful observations on the American fascination not only with its superheroes but with their serial resurrections, the proliferation and domination of what Wells called “the origin story“, a repeat of the discovery of Superman or the maiden voyage of the Enterprise. He said this wasn’t just an ingenious marketing device for Hollywood studios but represented something much deeper in the cultural mind of Americans, noting that these archetypical American superheroes are people without a past, not circumscribed by what has come before. He then stated that there is “an unquenchable thirst, a kind of inbuilt narrative desire in America to go back to the origins of things, to punch history’s reset button, reboot our lives and start again.” He asked whether Americans essentially lived “outside of history“, like their superheroes, not circumscribed by what has come before, being people without a past. He then noted that America’s own “origin story” seemed to be in a constant state of regeneration, with a new beginning always on the horizon, and he ended with the notion that the American imagination seemed almost supernaturally well-suited to this re-booting of society and of historical memory, noting importantly that the launching of the new history was intimately linked to the repression of old histories.

It wasn’t clear from the article if Wells appreciated the depth of his own perception, and I found myself wishing he had developed his theme a bit further. He was of course correct in the notion that Americans have been living ‘outside of history‘. That is precisely where they have been, their lack of a unifying history and culture being an insurmountable impediment to their progress as a people, their only adhesion coming from their mythical political religion. But America, and Americans, still fail and still have existential crises, in spite of their almost superhero powers. And whenever America appears again to be failing as a nation, as it has been especially since 2008, we have another flood of resurrected superheroes which represents precisely Americans “punching history’s reset button and starting again“. The economy has collapsed, democracy has failed everyone except the Jewish lobby and the top 1%, the American Dream is dead and the future looks hopeless. But then suddenly Superman is reborn, and America can re-boot and start over.

In an earlier article I wrote that whenever pressure is placed on Americans by unpleasant truths knocking on their doors, they employ the standard tools of denial, rationalisation and self-adoration, after which they just re-boot the system, clearing the data from all open files and erasing the (historical) memory. Then we re-start as if nothing untoward had ever happened. This is where America is today. The economic, authoritarian, judicial and political environments have created an existential crisis for which Americans have no powers to repel or even guide. It is increasingly apparent to them that the fundamentals on which their emotional well-being has been predicated, have been increasingly trashed by their own government, and their ability to ‘feel good to be an American‘ rapidly disappearing in consequence. And of all the possible responses available to them, Americans turn desperately to juvenile Hollywood imagery and replenish their emotional emptiness by flocking to the cinema to celebrate the rebirth of Superman, vicariously celebrating their own imaginary rebirth through a cartoon character. While this imagery might be appropriate for eight-year-old children, it is a bit ridiculous when adopted by adults, but this seems to be an accurate indication of the American mentality, the result of a century of mass manipulation and programming.

Such is the power of the sympathetic imagery created by Lippman and Bernays, arousing emotional experiences even more fake than those at Starbucks – and of much more human consequence. We can recollect Neal Gabler’s observations that the Jews of Hollywood created a shadow America, with a cluster of images and ideas so powerful that they colonized the American imagination, and that, ultimately, American values came to be defined largely by the movies the Jews made. The rebirth of Superman and the rebooting of America constitute one of those values.

Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).

His full archive can be seen at:

https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ and https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at:

2186604556@qq.com

………………………………

https://archive.ph/t52fq

England Arise, The Long Dark Night Is Over – Vaughn Williams – Cardiff Festival Choir (3:10 min) Video, Audio Mp3

Don’t Cry For Me, Massachusetts

It won’t be easy, you’ll think it’s strange
When I try to explain how I feel
That I still need your love after all that I’ve done
You won’t believe me
All you will see is a girl you once knew
Although she’s dressed up to the nines
At sixes and sevens with you

I had to let it happen, I had to change
Couldn’t stay all my life down at heel
Looking out of the window, staying out of the sun
So I chose freedom
Running around trying everything new
But nothing impressed me at all
I never expected it to

Don’t cry for me Massachusetts
The truth is I never left you
All through my wild days
My mad existence
I kept my promise
Don’t keep your distance

And as for fortune, and as for fame
I never invited them in
Though it seemed to the world they were all I desired
They are illusions
They’re not the solutions they promised to be
The answer was here all the time
I love you and hope you love me

Don’t cry for me Massachusetts—

Don’t cry for me Massachusetts
The truth is I never left you
All through my wild days
My mad existence
I kept my promise
Don’t keep your distance

Have I said too much?
There’s nothing more I can think of to say to you
But all you have to do
Is look at me to know
That every word is true

The Message Coming To My Eyes Says…

The Message Coming To My Eyes Says

UK Communist Music Sampler (14:34 min) Video, Audio Mp3

British Communist Music Sampler

Austrian Communist Music – Fourth International Flag

One Hour of Austrian Communist Music – Audio Mp3

The Internationale in German – Deutsch

Internationale – Deutsch – Audio Mp3

Don’t Get Lost In Boson

https://videopress.com/v/h1F6BMEn?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

‘The Hollywood Motion Picture Blacklist – Seventy-Five Years Later – Larry Ceplair Interview – Oct 2022

An interview with Larry Ceplair, author of The Hollywood Motion Picture Blacklist–Seventy-Five Years Later: The biggest consequence ‘was censorship and self-censorship, not officially, but unofficially’

David Walsh

10 October 2022

Seventy-five years ago this month, the ultra-right House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) opened its infamous hearings in Washington D.C. into “Communist influence” in the film industry.

The hearings led to the indictment—on charges of contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the committee—and the ultimate jailing of the members of the so-called Hollywood Ten, a group of left-wing writers, directors and producers. In the aftermath of the October 1947 hearings, the Hollywood studios initiated a blacklist, first of the Ten themselves (or those of them that were then employed), and ultimately, anyone labeled a “subversive” by HUAC and various anti-communist watchdogs.

The Hollywood Motion Picture Blacklist: Seventy-Five years Later

Estimates vary, and there was never an official list (the studios, for legal reasons, always denied that any blacklist existed), but approximately 325 screenwriters, actors and directors were banned. The total number of those blacklisted or “graylisted,” partially blocked from working, may have been as high as 500. Among them were some of the most talented and sensitive figures in the film world.

Immense pressure was exerted on individuals under conditions of the Cold War anti-communist hysteria to “name names.” The witch-hunters were implacable. Artists with left-wing histories had the choice of informing on and destroying former friends and comrades or seeing their own lives and careers ruined. This was “Scoundrel Time” in Lillian Hellman’s memorable phrase. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which uses the Salem witch trials as a metaphor, captures some of the terror and brutality of the era.

Directly or indirectly, the pressures drove numerous individuals to an early death, by heart attacks, strokes or suicide. Moreover, if one examines the lives and careers of Hollywood performers with an eye to this history, a distinct pattern emerges in sundry cases. X suddenly traveled to England or Europe to appear in or direct films. Y underwent a nervous breakdown in the early 1950s and never recovered his or her equilibrium. Alcoholism overcame Z. Others simply had the artistic or moral stuffing knocked out of them and never did anything challenging again. Many were intimidated into betraying their own best artistic and social instincts. Self-censorship, holding one’s tongue in the interests of self-preservation, became the order of the day.

The full consequences extend far beyond the thousands of personal tragedies. The aim of the HUAC campaign, backed by the FBI and the US state apparatus as a whole, endorsed by the trade unions and official American liberalism, was to purge left-wing ideas and, furthermore, to the greatest extent possible criminalize such ideas, to enshrine anti-communism. A variety of individual ills could be addressed by the movies, but there was to be no suggestion of something fundamentally wrong with American society. The film industry in the US has never recovered to this day.

Sympathy for the blacklist victims should not blind anyone to the disastrous, reactionary character of the policies pursued by the Stalinist Communist Party, which themselves had far-reaching consequences. We have noted before that “the CP and its membership had been profoundly and irretrievably compromised by the crimes of Stalinism.” The Moscow Trials, the GPU murders of left-wing elements in Spain, the Stalin-Hitler Pact and other events left them politically vulnerable. “In a broader intellectual sense, the CP membership had been largely indifferent to theoretical questions and tended to accept Stalinism as a brand of left-wing American radicalism,” we wrote.

The Stalinists’ “Popular Front” policies, which subordinated the working class to the Democratic Party and the Roosevelt administration, rendered the Hollywood left thoroughly unprepared once Washington’s wartime alliance with the Soviet Union ended, “the mask came off and the grisly visage of American imperialism, now the dominant capitalist power, appeared.” The CP had promised “a rebirth of democracy, a New Deal on an even grander and more social democratic scale.” The party’s members and periphery, won on the basis that Communism was “20th-Century Americanism,” found it very difficult, if not impossible, “to stand up to the immense pressures once the tide turned and the Cold War began.”

Larry Ceplair has a lengthy history of writing about the blacklist and related matters. He is the co-author, along with Steven Englund, of The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–60, first published in 1979, one of the most valuable works on the subject. In addition, he is the author of Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America: A Critical History, Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical and The Marxist and the Movies: A Biography of Paul Jarrico. Ceplair is professor emeritus of history at Santa Monica College in California.

In the preface to his new book, The Hollywood Motion Picture Blacklist: Seventy-Five Years Later, Ceplair explains that this year marks “the forty-seventh anniversary of my first foray into the archives to write about [the blacklist]. Since then, I have coauthored The Inquisition in Hollywood, two biographies of blacklisted screenwriters, dozens of articles and book and film reviews on the subject, conducted many oral histories, and curated an exhibit at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.”

In addition to the lead essay, “Looking Back,” which considers the “pendulum swing of historiography” in relation to the blacklist, the new book includes pieces on “Jewish Anti-Communism” in the US and Hollywood and the ongoing debate over the “Politics and Morality of Cooperative and Uncooperative Witnesses” who testified before HUAC, 1947–1953. There are also studies of writers Dashiell Hammett, Ring Lardner Jr. (neither of whom capitulated to the witch-hunt) and Isobel Lennart (who did).

In “Looking Back,” Ceplair notes that the “right-wing mythologizers,” the defenders of the Hollywood purges, who have come to the fore since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in particular, “are not interested in facts and definitions; they abhor complexity and nuance. The attitudes or motives of Communists are unwelcome intruders in the simplistic and reductionist world of anti-Communism, in which anyone who dared to oppose the policies and acts of the domestic Cold War was to be demonized.”

The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover

Continuing, Ceplair asserts that it is, rather, “the anti-Communists who should apologize for J. Edgar Hoover, Martin Dies, Richard Nixon, and Joseph McCarthy. And if assignment of blame is indeed possible, it is the anti-Communists who must be assigned responsibility for the perpetuation of investigations and proscriptions and the ruined lives of the thousands of people caught up in the jaws of the Cold War juggernaut they assembled and operated. This behemoth emboldened a rogues’ gallery of demagogues to inflate, often for their own agendas, the threat posed to national security by domestic Communists.”

Later, he asks, “What had the motion picture blacklist accomplished, aside from barring approximately three hundred people from their chosen vocation, hastening the exit of hundreds of people from the Hollywood Communist Party, altering the content of movies, and creating an informer subculture in Hollywood?”

Larry Ceplair spoke to the WSWS recently on a video call.

***

David Walsh: As far as you know, is there going to be any official Hollywood, film industry or Academy recognition of the 75th anniversary of the blacklist?

Larry Ceplair: To the best of my knowledge, no. The industry made a big deal out of it in 2002. There were effusive apologies from the guilds. I don’t think they’re going to do anything more. Film historian Ed Rampell organized various other blacklist anniversaries. But I haven’t heard anything that he’s doing this time. So I assume it’s just going to pass quietly.

DW: Apart from your own book, The Hollywood Motion Picture Blacklist: Seventy-Five Years Later, is there any kind of outpouring of new commentary on the events?

LC: I haven’t seen any. One of the reasons is that, as far as I know, Norma Barzman is probably the only blacklist victim still alive. Marsha Hunt died three weeks ago or so. The victims were the force behind the anti-Elia Kazan protest in 1999 and similar events. They’re gone now, and their surviving children don’t seem that interested.

DW: Do you have any sense of how many people in the film industry, and more broadly, are even aware of what took place 75 years ago?

LC: Very few, I think. There are of course historians and history students, but in the general population, including the film population, it’s a very small number who know about this history. And those who do are divided between those who have been supporters of the “unfriendly” witnesses and those who don’t like them. We’re an aging group, you know. In 10 more years there might not be anybody around to carry on this debate.

DW: How did you come upon this subject and why did it affect you? Why did you begin writing about this?

LC: Well, it was somewhat roundabout. I was living in New York at the time and New York has a lot of repertory movie theaters. I was going to a lot of movies from the ’30s and ’40s. It just struck me that they were so much better than the movies I was seeing, the current movies.

The auteur theory was very big in New York at that time, Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice and so on. I started reading books about directors, but I quickly realized that directors don’t really know what they’re doing. They do it in some subliminal, instinctive level. They can’t really explain what they’re doing.

I started looking at the writers as a group, and I realized they were the largest group of blacklistees. That’s how I started studying the events themselves. I thought most of the books I read were really superficial and condescending. I was enough of a historian to know that people don’t get prosecuted and proscribed that way unless they had some substance to them.

My co-author Steven Englund’s stepfather had been a member of the Screenwriters Guild for many years. I said, I think we have an interesting story here about the writers and their politicization. That’s how that started, in the mid-1970s.

DW: In the first essay in the new book you discuss the historiography on the blacklist. You point to the leftward shift in the 1960s and 1970s, which expressed hostility to the anti-communist purges, and then the change that took place, the right-wing backlash in the 1990s, especially following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

LC: One of the major events was the opening of the former Soviet archives, and the release of all those records, which revealed the correspondence between the Communist Parties and the Russians. So these right-wingers said, you see, we were right all along. The Communists were agents of a foreign power and they were out to destroy us. The Cold War was important and correct.

DW: We are the most vehement opponents of Stalinism, but to identify the Communist Party as nothing more than a GPU conspiracy was McCarthyite rubbish. Thousands of people joined the Party, not to support Stalin and the gulags, but to fight racism, anti-Semitism, fascism, capitalism. They were wrong in the party they joined, and their defense of Stalinism discredited and often destroyed them. But some of the most talented people found themselves in that organization.

LC: I agree. The notion that somehow or other, if people hadn’t joined the Communist Party, something would have happened differently in the Soviet Union is just illogical nonsense.

DW: As we noted years ago in writing about Elia Kazan, informers like Kazan never bothered to explain how ceding the struggle against totalitarianism to McCarthy, John Foster Dulles, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, the CIA, the FBI and the US military “would advance the cause of human liberation.”

LC: That is because they cannot. Their post-facto explanations are flimsy rationalizations of their primal reason for informing: keeping their jobs. The explanations of the unfriendly witnesses are more substantive. I first learned of them, and got some of my inspiration, as a number of us did, from watching Hollywood on Trial [1976], which I still think is by far the best documentary on the subject. Around the same time that Steven and I started working, Nancy Schwartz started preparing her book on The Hollywood Writers’ Wars. Victor Navasky had also done something on the Hollywood Ten in articles in the New York Times, as a sort of prelude to his book, Naming Names.

We were not the first, but I think we were among the first cohort to start working seriously on this. No one had gone back to the ’30s and ’40s. That’s what the new group did.

Texas Democrat Martin Dies Jr. served as chair of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities for 7 years

DW: Could you explain a little about the Dies Committee, later the House Un-American Activities Committee, and how it was set up?

LC: Originally, the committee was the brainchild of a congressman from New York. Samuel Dickstein was Jewish and he wanted to investigate the proliferation of fascist groups in the United States in the mid-30s. Dickstein wanted to investigate these as agents of a foreign power, etc. The committee was originally called the Special Committee on Un-American Activities. Dickstein wasn’t named chairman, that went to John W. McCormack, a Democrat from Massachusetts.

McCormack began to shift the committee from looking at fascism, to looking at all “subversive groups.” Martin Dies, a right-wing Democrat from Texas, became chairman in 1938, and then it became purely an anti-communist committee. Dies did not seek re-election in 1944. At that point, John Rankin, the Democrat from Mississippi, became the main influence over the committee. When the Republicans won control of Congress in 1946, John Parnell Thomas from New Jersey became chairman.

So Dies was around for about six or seven years and didn’t really make a dent. He tried twice to come out to Hollywood during the late 1930s and early 1940s to conduct investigations, but he found no support at that time. On these occasions the studio owners didn’t support him. There was no Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, established in 1944, to support him.

DW: Presumably during the war years these failures had something to do with the alliance with the Soviet Union and the policy of the Roosevelt administration.

LC: That obviously dampened anti-Soviet talk, but it never went away. It always remained a subtext. And groups like the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, big businessmen, Southern Democrats, they were just waiting for the war to end so they could launch, or relaunch, the Red Scare.

DW: John Rankin was one of the filthiest of the HUAC figures, an out-and-out fascist, a defender of the Ku Klux Klan.

LC: Rankin was a virulent anti-Semite and racist, anti-communist, a man simply without any moral scruple whatsoever. He was important because he was the one who pushed for HUAC to be made permanent and for it to take up the Hollywood investigations again. So a significant but horrible figure politically.

J. Edgar Hoover, of course, is one of the most important figures of the Cold War. He’s a spider at the center of this vast web that grew so significantly and became so powerful.

HUAC had its own investigators. They had two investigators who came out to Hollywood on a pretty regular basis and made contact with the anti-communists there. But they kept pushing Hoover for more and he kept saying, no, no, because he just despised the HUAC people. Hoover thought they were latecomers to the game and not very serious. He thought the committee was detracting from the effort, like Joe McCarthy, who he thought was making the anti-communism issue ridiculous, bringing it into disrepute. Finally, in September 1947, Hoover agreed to give them names without, however, handing over the full files.

Members of the Hollywood Ten and their families in 1950, protesting the impending incarceration of the ten

DW: We have written about the fact that there was a significant change in the situation in the US in 1947–48: “The American political and media establishment’s anticommunist campaign had shifted into full gear.”

In addition to the HUAC hearings into “Communist influence” in Hollywood in the autumn of 1947 and the eventual conviction and sentencing of the Hollywood Ten, throughout 1948 “the Communist Party leadership in New York City faced prosecution under the Smith Act, which outlawed conspiring to advocate forcible overthrow of the government; in August 1948 congressional hearings (presided over by Richard Nixon) began into accusations that former State Department official Alger Hiss had spied for the Soviet Union; the following summer, indicating the general climate, a right-wing mob broke up a Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, New York.”

LC: You can see the sprouts beginning to come up in 1946, but the major turning point came in March 1947, with the announcement of the Truman Doctrine. And the institution of loyalty investigations of all federal employees.

DW: Could you explain what happened in May 1947 when HUAC came to Hollywood and held closed-door hearings?

Rep. J. Parnell Thomas

LC: A HUAC subcommittee came out with Parnell Thomas. They held closed-door hearings at the Biltmore Hotel and most of the witnesses were of the “friendly” variety. Studio head Jack Warner was one of them. Most of the rest were members of the Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.

So almost all the information they were getting could be used to issue subpoenas. They also used the trip, I think, to try to intimidate the Motion Picture Association of America, the studio heads, to get them to cooperate. They were saying, you guys really have a problem here. And if you don’t do something about it, we will.

Eric Johnson, president of the association, and the producers took the same position they had 10 years earlier, which was, “We have the situation under control. We don’t need this sort of thing.” But this time around, HUAC wasn’t buying it. And so they go back to Washington with a lot of names.

DW: In September 1947, 43 friendly and unfriendly—i.e., left-wing—witnesses were issued subpoenas to appear in October in Washington before HUAC. There were originally 19 unfriendly witnesses, including German playwright Bertolt Brecht, and that was whittled down to 11 or 10, if you exclude Brecht (who left the country). Why were those 10 (or 11) actually called, do you think?

LC: You know, no one really knows. I asked that question to many people, including Albert Maltz, Lester Cole, two of the Ten. And there doesn’t seem to be any single rhyme or reason to it. All were male, mostly writers, a significant number were Jewish, almost no one had a war record, which I think is important. The committee didn’t want to be seen persecuting war heroes. Three of them weren’t Communists at all. Howard Koch, Lewis Milestone, Irving Pichel, none of whom was called. Although Koch ended up being blacklisted anyway.

DW: Like Marsha Hunt, whom we wrote about a few weeks ago. She seems to have just been a principled liberal, never close to the Communist Party. What about the Committee for the First Amendment, the group of prominent Hollywood liberals, who opposed HUAC?

LC: That committee was started by director William Wyler and screenwriter Phillip Dunne, both solid liberals. The Hollywood liberals very much disliked what HUAC was trying to do. But they didn’t want to defend the 19 directly; their goal was to bring HUAC into disrepute.

For one thing, they knew that most of the 19 were Communists. They knew that the 19 were probably going to take a position in the hearings that was different from what they wanted to do. The 19 weren’t going to be forthright First Amendment defenders. So Wyler, Dunne and company tried to draw a line. They would defend the principle, but not the person, which I think is an impossible line to draw.

Most of them were sincere, naive liberals. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall are good examples of that. I give them credit for what they initially tried to do.

The Committee for the First Amendment made two national radio broadcasts. They had this well-publicized trip to Washington D.C. They were ineffective. For example, Richard Nixon, when he heard they were coming, immediately flew back to California so he wouldn’t have to confront them or deal with them.

DW: Did they do anything in Washington aside from attending the hearings in October 1947?

LC: No. They tried to meet with HUAC and present them with petitions, but they didn’t have any success. And, of course, as soon as they got back to Hollywood, the studio bosses called them in and said, stop this. And they did. Humphrey Bogart wrote his famous column for Photoplay in 1948, “I’m No Communist,” which was horrible.

DW: Yes, whether he wrote it or his agent wrote it, somebody wrote it anyway. But it was a horrible article.

LC: It shows the atmosphere of fear there was at that time. I think a few scenes in The Way We Were [Sidney Pollack, 1973] capture that well.

DW: This is something we have written about a number of times—how prepared do you think the Hollywood left was for what hit it?

LC: After May 1947, they began to think that something big was coming and they began to have a series of meetings, preparing the ground of what might be coming. So I don’t think they were entirely unprepared, but I think when they received the subpoenas, they were shocked. That was a step beyond what they thought was going to happen.

They were not organized in any real sense. They were in the Communist Party. They were in groups like the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions. But it was only after they got the subpoenas that they put together a defense committee.

DW: What was the role of the liberals, the ACLU, organizations like that?

LC: Nonexistent. They didn’t do anything of import. The ACLU has a very dicey record during these years in terms of defending communists. There were a large number of liberal anti-communists, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., for example, who made no effort to try and get due process for the Communists.

DW: What role did the unions play?

Roy Brewer of IATSE in 1954 (Photo credit–Los Angeles Times)

LC: The biggest union in Hollywood was the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees [IATSE], and it was anti-communist through and through. Roy Brewer, their international representative in Hollywood, was probably the most zealous anti-communist I’ve ever heard about or met. He went to his grave [in 2006] believing there was still a Communist conspiracy in the United States.

The only union that might have been supportive was the Conference of Studio Unions. But they were caught up in a huge jurisdictional strike confrontation with IATSE and the producers that basically broke their backs. So they really were no help. The [writers, directors and actors] guilds kind of stood back, taking the position that “we don’t have a Communist problem,” but not supporting the 19.

DW: Obviously, the purging of Hollywood of left-wing forces and the purging of the unions are associated processes. What do you think were some of the broader social and cultural consequences of the blacklist?

LC: I think the biggest one was censorship and self-censorship, not officially, but unofficially. The studios, which always were wary about doing films with a strong social content, became utterly opposed to them. Those who kept their jobs didn’t want to do anything to call attention to themselves.

So I think they began to seriously censor themselves. There was a trend of social commentary movies after World War II for a number of reasons. People were hyped by the successful fight against fascism. Many of them had made documentaries during the war. They wanted to come back and do that sort of thing in America.

As a result of that and other processes, there were more social problem films made between 1945 and 1947 than ever before. They were a significant portion of the output. They almost disappear after that. Insofar as you think film is important in creating a dialog, a way of thinking about things, it became a much narrower media form.

The blacklisted writers published a few novels with small publishers, and they published a few periodicals, so they weren’t completely silenced. But they couldn’t write movie scripts under their own names. I think it had a significant dampening effect on ’50s’ culture.

DW: Left-wing thought was essentially criminalized. The most interesting artists in Hollywood were not necessarily CP members, although there was a group of writers and also directors such as Abe Polonsky and Joseph Losey. But I agree, the movies made between 1945 and 1951 are the most interesting movies made in Hollywood’s history.

Tim Holt, Walter Huston and Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

Not all of them explicitly political, often they couldn’t be, but there’s a strong element of opposition, of criticism, along with great texture and depth. From Orson Welles and John Huston, for example, left figures but not associated with the Communist Party.

There were Max Ophuls’ Caught and The Reckless Moment, Edgar Ulmer’s Ruthless, Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Welles’ The Stranger and The Lady From Shanghai, Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce, Flamingo Road and The Breaking Point, Abe Polonsky’s Force of Evil, Raoul Walsh’s White Heat, Robert Siodmak’s The Killers and Criss Cross, Anthony Mann’s Raw Deal and a hundred lesser-known films. This kind of filmmaking was essentially made impossible. It became almost impossible to make films about contemporary American life. So you went and made Westerns and so on.

Beatrice Pearson and John Garfield in Force of Evil (1948)

LC: Whereas in the ’50s, you had almost 50 explicitly anti-communist movies. They didn’t do very well, but there they were. I can count on the fingers of one hand the movies that really spoke to opposition. Perhaps Bad Day at Black Rock with Spencer Tracy, and Storm Center with Bette Davis, as a librarian who gets fired for having the wrong books, and Broken Arrow. Not many more.

It became too dangerous to express any criticism of the United States. Sixteenth-century Dutch artists painted landscapes because it was politically dangerous to do anything else.

DW: What is your purpose in continuing to write about these issues?

LC: Because I think the First Amendment is in a very precarious condition. It’s been under attack in the United States almost from the very beginning and it’s under attack especially today. I think it’s incredibly important for people to understand that.

We have a Bill of Rights, but it doesn’t mean much unless people are vigilant and defend it. Otherwise, it’s just a piece of paper, I think. Vigilance, critical thinking are just crucial. I don’t think we have enough of that right now.

DW: Do you plan to continue this work?

LC: I think this is my last hurrah in regard to the blacklist. I don’t think I have anything else to say.

DW: How would you define your own politics?

LC: I would say I’m a democratic socialist. I think we need a socialist form of government. But I believe strongly that we have to reach it through some sort of democratic process. You mentioned that you were a Trotskyist. Leon Trotsky is one of my great, great heroes.

DW: So you’ve read some of his works.

LC: I’ve read everything that’s in translation. Permanent Revolution and Literature and Revolution are great books. I think the way Trotsky acted in 1917, during the revolution, was genius. I don’t think there could have been a Bolshevik revolution without Trotsky. And his commentaries on fascism, during the 1930s, were brilliant.

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How the Anti-war Camp Went Intellectually Bankrupt – by James Kirchick (The Atlantic) 29 Sept 2022

Critics of U.S. foreign policy from both ends of the ideological spectrum have found common cause in supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Getty

Updated at 8:30 a.m. ET on September 30, 2022

In 1942, answering a pacifist opponent of British involvement in the Second World War, George Orwell replied that “pacifism is objectively pro-fascist.” There have of course been many times in human history when opposition to war has been morally justified, intellectually coherent, and, in the end, vindicated. But the war to defeat fascism during the middle part of the past century was simply not one of them. “This is elementary common sense,” Orwell wrote at the time. “If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other.”

Eight decades later, as a fascistic Russian regime wages war against Ukraine, a motley collection of voices from across the political spectrum has called upon the United States and its allies to adopt neutrality as their position. Ranging from anti-imperialists on the left to isolationists on the right and more respectable “realists” in between, these critics are not pacifists in the strict sense of the term. Few if any oppose the use of force as a matter of principle. But nor are they neutral. It is not sufficient, they say, for the West to cut off its supply of defensive weaponry to Ukraine. It must also atone for “provoking” Russia to attack its smaller, peaceful, democratic neighbor, and work at finding a resolution that satisfies what Moscow calls its “legitimate security interests.” In this, today’s anti-war caucus is objectively pro-fascist.

To appreciate the bizarrely kaleidoscopic nature of this caucus, consider the career of a catchphrase. “Is Washington Fighting Russia Down to the Last Ukrainian?” asked the headline of a column self-published in March by Ron Paul, the former Republican congressman and presidential candidate. It was a strange question for Paul to be posing just three weeks into President Vladimir Putin’s unjustifiable and unforgivable invasion, especially considering the extraordinary lengths to which the Biden administration had gone to avoid “fighting Russia.”

Even stranger than Paul’s assertion that the U.S. was goading Ukrainians into sacrificing themselves on the altar of its Russophobic bloodlust, though, has been the proliferation of his specious talking point across the ideological spectrum.

Ten days after Paul accused his country of treating Ukrainians as cannon fodder, the retired American diplomat Chas Freeman repeated the quip. “We will fight to the last Ukrainian for Ukrainian independence,” Freeman declared sarcastically—even as he excused Russia’s “special military operation” as an understandable reaction to being “stiff-armed” by the West on the “28-year-old demands that NATO stop enlarging in the direction of Russia.” Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a senior fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute, made these remarks in an interview with The GrayZone, a self-described “independent news website dedicated to original investigative journalism and analysis on politics and empire.”

Although The GrayZone would characterize itself as an “anti-imperialist” news source, the opaquely financed publication is highly selective in the empires it chooses to scrutinize; it is difficult to find criticism of Russia or China—or any other American adversary—on its site. A more accurate descriptor of its ideological outlook is “campist,” denoting a segment of the sectarian far left that sees the world as divided into two camps: the imperialist West and the anti-imperialist rest.

Freeman, who served as Richard Nixon’s interpreter during his 1972 visit to China, seemed to feel at home in The GrayZone. In that Manichaean domain—one that lacks, naturally, any shades of gray—no anti-Western tyrant is too brutal for fawning adulation, and America is always to blame. A Republican foreign-policy hand in conversation with a fringe leftist website might seem like an odd pairing, but Freeman has a fondness for dictators.

In 2009, when Freeman was appointed to serve on the National Intelligence Council during the first year of the Obama administration, a series of leaked emails revealed a window into his worldview. Observing the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Freeman praised the Chinese Communist Party for its bloody crackdown on peaceful student demonstrators; his only criticism of its dispersal of this “mob scene” was that it had been “overly cautious” in displaying “ill-conceived restraint.” It is quite something to read a retired American diplomat criticizing the Chinese regime for being too soft during the Tiananmen massacre, but such views are not as aberrational as they sound. Within the school of foreign-policy “realism,” notions of morality are seen as quaint distractions from the real business of great-power politics.

In April, it was Noam Chomsky’s turn to recite the Pauline mantra in a podcast with the editor of Current Affairs, a leftist magazine. Going out of his way to praise Freeman as “one of the most astute and respected figures in current U.S. diplomatic circles,” the world’s most famous radical intellectual endorsed the crusty veteran of realist GOP administrations for characterizing American policy in Eastern Europe as “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.”

From Chomsky’s mouth to Putin’s ears.

“A great deal is being said about the United States’ intention to fight against Russia ‘to the last Ukrainian’—they say it there and they say it here,” the Russian president mused the following week, prefacing his mention of the gibe with his own version of that Trumpian rhetorical flourish, “A lot of people are saying.” That same month, an American Conservative article by Doug Bandow of the libertarian Cato Institute was headlined “Washington Will Fight Russia to the Last Ukrainian,” denying Ukrainians any agency in their own struggle by answering the question Paul had rhetorically asked.

Soon after, the dean of realist international-relations theorists, the University of Chicago scholar  John Mearsheimer, used the line as though he’d just thought of it. By then, the argument that America was “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian” had ping-ponged between both ends of the ideological spectrum an astonishing number of times. The point for the anti-imperialist left and the isolationist right, as well as the realist fellow travelers hitched to each side, was that blame for the conflict lies mainly with the U.S., which is using Ukraine as a proxy for its nefarious interventionism in Moscow’s backyard.

That the fringe left would blame America—which it views as the source of all capitalist exploitation, military aggression, and imperialist evil in the world—for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is predictable. It blames America for everything. When, two days after the Russian invasion began on February 24, the Democratic Socialists of America called upon “the US to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict,” mainstream Democrats condemned the statement. More significant has been the position taken by mainstream realists, who similarly fault the West for somehow “provoking” Russia into waging war on its neighbor. These politically disparate forces share more than a talking point. They also have a worldview in common.

Consider America’s leading realist think tank, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. This “transpartisan” group enjoyed great fanfare upon its founding, in 2019, with seed funding from the libertarian Charles Koch and the left-wing George Soros. After two decades of “forever wars,” here at last was an ideologically diverse assortment of reasonable, sober-minded experts committed to pursuing a “foreign policy of restraint.” But counseling restraint as a rapacious, revisionist dictatorship wages total war on its smaller, democratic neighbor had a whiff of appeasement for at least one of Quincy’s fellows, leading to a split within the organization.

“The institute is ignoring the dangers and the horrors of Russia’s invasion and occupation,” Joe Cirincione, a nuclear non-proliferation expert and one of the group’s leading left-of-center scholars, said upon his resignation this summer, adding that Quincy “focuses almost exclusively on criticism of the United States, NATO, and Ukraine. They excuse Russia’s military threats and actions because they believe that they have been provoked by U.S. policies.”

The moral myopia Cirincione identifies is an essential trait of the new online magazine Compact, where self-styled anti-woke Marxists and Catholic theocrats unite in their loathing of classical liberal values at home and their opposition to defending those values abroad. In an article titled “Fueling Zelensky’s War Hurts America,” the left-wing writer Batya Ungar-Sargon took issue with the U.S. supplying defensive weaponry to Kyiv, arguing that resources devoted to supporting Ukrainians would be better spent helping economically disadvantaged Americans.

Pushing the United States to prioritize the needs of its poorest citizens, even if that means forgoing its responsibilities for maintaining the European security order, is at least an intellectually defensible position (if a shortsighted and reductive one). But Ungar-Sargon also went out of her way to give credence to Russia’s specious territorial claims.

“If Ukraine’s territorial integrity were of such immense national interest,” she wrote, “surely we would have climbed the rapid-escalation ladder back in 2014, when Moscow invaded and annexed Crimea—a move that a referendum found was popular among Crimeans.” The plebiscite Ungar-Sargon endorsed was held under Russian gunpoint to provide a legal fig leaf for the first armed annexation of territory on the European continent since World War II. She also identified Donetsk and Luhansk—the two Russian-backed separatist enclaves in Eastern Ukraine that Putin recognized as puppet states on the eve of his invasion and where he has now held similarly meaningless referenda annexing them to Russia—as “independent republics,” conferring a legitimacy that was in marked contrast to the way she referred dismissively to “the United States and its European satrapies.”

Many commentators have likened Volodymyr Zelensky to Winston Churchill for his charismatic resistance to foreign invaders and his ability to raise the morale of his people. In light of this popular association, the headline that the editors of Compact devised for Ungar-Sargon’s apologia—“Zelensky’s War”—is nauseating, blaming the victim while seeming to evoke the title of a notorious book by the Holocaust-denying historian David Irving, Churchill’s War.

Condemning the U.S. and its allies for the unfolding tragedy in Ukraine requires one to ignore or downplay a great deal of Russian misbehavior. This is a characteristic that unites left-wing anti-imperialists, right-wing isolationists, and the ostensibly more respectable “realists.”

“Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet Empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine as well as other countries in Eastern Europe,” Mearsheimer wrote in a 2014 essay titled “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault.” “But this account is wrong.” Eight years on, as Russian forces marched toward Kyiv and Putin issued vague threats of nuclear escalation, Mearsheimer made no acknowledgment of how very wrong his own earlier, sanguine assessment of Putin’s intentions had been.

“We invented this story that Putin is highly aggressive and he’s principally responsible for this crisis in Ukraine,” he told The New Yorker a week into the invasion. Putin’s apparent goal of overthrowing Zelensky and installing a puppet regime would not be an example of “imperialism,” Mearsheimer argued, and was meaningfully different from “conquering and holding onto Kyiv.” All of this linguistic legerdemain would surely come as news to the Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, and other peoples of the region who once suffered under the Russian imperial yoke.

As evidence of Russian war crimes against Ukrainian civilians mounts, Mearsheimer has cleaved to his position that NATO enlargement is to blame for the war. “I think all the trouble in this case really started in April, 2008, at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, where afterward NATO issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO,” he also told The New Yorker. Although the NATO communiqué did express the alliance’s hope that the two former Soviet republics would become members at some indefinite point in the future, it came after France and Germany had successfully blocked a proposal by the Bush administration to offer Ukraine and Georgia an actual path to membership. But even if the U.S. had made such a promise, how would that justify the invasion and occupation of Ukraine? Mearsheimer also ignores the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, according to which the United States, Britain, and Russia guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine surrendering its nuclear weapons. This concord lasted for 20 years, until Putin abrogated it by invading and occupying Crimea.

Even more obtuse are the excuses for Russian aggression made by Mearsheimer’s fellow academic realist, the Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs has worked as an adviser to a host of international institutions, such as the World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, as a development economist. Unlike Mearsheimer, he has no particular expertise in foreign political affairs, but this has not stopped him from pronouncing on geopolitical issues. Last December, as Russia was amassing its forces on Ukraine’s border, Sachs suggested that “NATO should take Ukraine’s membership off the table, and Russia should forswear any invasion.” This ignored the fact that Russia had already invaded the country in 2014.

Seeking to explain “the West’s false narrative” about Ukraine after the war began, Sachs noted, “Since 1980 the US has been in at least 15 overseas wars of choice (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Serbia, Syria and Yemen to name just a few), while China has been in none, and Russia only in one (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union.” This sentence contains two significant qualifications. First, Sachs’s counting only those “wars of choice” that Russia waged “beyond the former Soviet Union” implies that its invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 were permissible through some sort of Cold War–continuity droit de seigneur. Second, Sachs’s selection of 1980 as the starting point for his comparison conveniently excludes the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which began in December 1979 and became the Red Army’s own forever war, lasting almost 10 years and playing a crucial role in the Soviet Union’s demise.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has exposed the incompetence of the Russian military and the hubris of President Putin. It has also revealed the bravery and resilience of the Ukrainian people, who, contrary to Ron Paul’s ambulatory talking point, had no need of any American to prod or gull them into defending their homeland. Here in the U.S., the war has also exposed the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of an ideologically diverse set of foreign-policy commentators: the “anti-imperialists” who routinely justify blatant acts of imperial conquest, and the “realists” who make arguments unmoored from reality.

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James Kirchick: Being gay was the gravest sin

The art and politics of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022) – by David Walsh – 6 Oct 2022

French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard died September 13 at his home in Rolle, Switzerland, at the age of 91.

Godard came to prominence in the early 1960s as a member of the French “New Wave,” which also included such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette. Like many of the latter group, Godard was first a film critic in Paris, often associated with the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma (founded in 1951).

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Godard made a number of politically radical films. The mass general strike of May-June 1968 in France figured prominently in his development at this time. From the mid-1970s onward, disoriented by national and global events, Godard experimented with images and sound in a series of increasingly gloomy, incoherent works. Many of his later films are virtually unwatchable.

Jean-Luc Godard during the filming of Contempt (1963)

Godard’s body of work, which includes nearly 50 feature films and dozens of shorter ones, is peculiar in that, at the time of his death, it could be argued that he had not directed a genuinely significant work in half a century. The key to that does not lie in the filmmaker’s mysteriously losing his touch, although no doubt there was a personal intellectual decline (almost a dissolution), but in the political and artistic environment in which he worked for decades, dominated by demoralization and pessimism.

As idiosyncratic as Godard’s evolution and final artistic destination may have been, they were, in the final analysis, nothing more than the unique “welding together” of moods and traits common to a generation or more of once left intellectuals: disappointment with history and society in general; a repudiation of any orientation to the working class as a force for social change; a misanthropic blaming of the population for war, ecological damage and other catastrophes; impressionistic, anti-scientific responses to the end of the USSR; susceptibility to “human rights” imperialism; a rejection of a class perspective in favor of identity politics; skepticism about the possibility of truthfully representing reality in words or images; and hostility toward rational, coherent thought.

Between 1960 and 1967, Godard directed 15 feature films that made an impression on a younger generation in particular, including Breathless (1960), Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live, 1962), Le petit soldat (The Little Soldier, 1963), Contempt (1963), Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le Fou (1965), Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), La Chinoise (1967) and Weekend (1967). 

These early New Wave films were a breath of fresh air in many ways. They were made without so many of the constraints of 1950s cinema. Godard took various genres, shook them up and rolled them out like dice: crime drama, musical, science fiction, comedy, political thriller. From one moment to the next characters could recite poetry, make love, philosophize, fire guns, protest the Algerian or Vietnam war. Literary and film allusions, advertisements, paintings abounded, frequently in an intriguing, pointed fashion. Young people appreciated the impudent humor, the sensuality and, generally, the anti-establishment, anarchic goings-on and, at the same time, the attempt to create something greater than mere entertainment. It was during these years that Godard asserted that the “cinema is optimistic, because everything is always possible, nothing is ever prohibited; all you need is to be in touch with life.”

(cont. https://archive.ph/VkAok )

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US – National Public Radio – NPR is Not Your Friend – by Kody Cava – 28 Sept 2022

National Public Radio began as a scrappy institution featuring the voices of average Americans. Today it’s a sterile, inoffensive corporate product that is produced, funded, and consumed by a narrow demographic of highly educated liberals.

……………………….

NPR is a problem. Good and proper leftists who read Current Affairs may already realize this. “Of course. NPR (Neoliberal Propaganda Radio) is a bastion of establishment groupthink and orthodoxy that gives cover to imperialism and corporate capitalism.” By contrast, readers on the Right who find themselves consuming Current Affairs may have an equally disdainful but entirely different critique. “Of course. NPR is an elitist liberal propaganda cult that serves as a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, is openly hostile to any conservative voices, and ought to be defunded!”

Well, you’re both kind of right, and both kind of wrong.

NPR, originating like PBS from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, was originally envisioned as an ad-free public service to all Americans, standing as a supplement to privately owned commercial media and which would do the reporting that others did not. Yet, like much other media, NPR has become a partisan news service with a sterile, professional tone that belies an underlying allegiance to a very narrow range of political viewpoints that are largely inoffensive to those in power. Today, NPR is a product stuffed with advertisements. It receives relatively little in government funding and is mostly paid for by corporations and a small percentage of its listeners who come from a very specific demographic: white, well-educated liberals. NPR’s shift in funding and ethos means the outlet has come to exhibit some of the worst pathologies found in the commercial mass media.

NPR is not our friend. Let’s take a closer look at why this is.

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NPR’s reach has grown considerably since its founding. Its programming reaches approximately 57 million people every week, while its flagship drive time newscasts, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, are in the top 5 highest rated radio programs in the country, pulling in close to 15 million listeners per week. Needless to say, NPR has an enormous influence over the national conversation, particularly amongst its mostly liberal listeners.

In a world full of overtly partisan outlets such as CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, The Atlantic, Infowars, The Daily Wire, and many others, one might be tempted to think that National Public Radio is a relatively moderate voice of reason amongst the sound and fury: a benevolent public service funded by the taxpayer, as friendly, essential, and innocuous as the Post Office.

NPR has “objective and balanced coverage.” That’s the assessment of Jack Mitchell, the first producer of NPR’s All Things Considered, who spoke with me recently about the evolution of NPR over the years. (He left the organization over 25 years ago and is now professor emeritus at University of Wisconsin-Madison.) Regarding the quality of NPR’s coverage, Mitchell said, “it’s not that different from the tone of the New York Times.” (Sadly, true.)

According to NPR’s Ethics Handbook, “Fair, accurate, impartial reporting is the foundation of NPR news coverage.” However, it is critical to understand that there is no such thing as impartiality in the media. The decisions made every day regarding what stories to cover, how much time to devote to a particular point of view, whom to talk to, whom not to talk to, and what tone and style should be employed when telling a story all represent subjective positions and points of view. Anyone who claims that their outlet is “objective” is high on their own fumes. NPR’s own Nina Totenberg concedes this point. (She said: “Objectivity should never be confused with fairness. Nobody is purely objective. It is not possible. … What all of us are capable of is fairness.”)

(cont. https://archive.ph/HAURK Archived)

https://archive.ph/HAURK

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US: Banned book authors say new wave of censorship is most dangerous yet – By Alejandra O’Connell-Domenech (The Hill) 6 Oct 2022

“The difference this time is it’s never been this organized. It was usually one or two parents in one school district,” author Sherman Alexie said. “But this organizational effort has far more power and influence.”

A display of banned books is in a Barnes & Noble book store in Pittsford, New York, on Sunday, September 25, 2022. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)

Story at a glance

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• Over 1,600 individual book titles have been banned from school classrooms or libraries over the past year, according to PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for freedom of expression.  

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• While book bans are nothing new in the United States some authors worry about the most recent wave of censorship.  

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• Authors of banned books say the efforts to contest their books have never been more organized before.  

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Book bans are nothing new in the United States but authors of some of the country’s most contested books worry about the newest push to censor what literature children have access to in schools.  

“I’m an old pro at this,” said Sherman Alexie, author of the young adult novel “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.” The novel tells the story of Arnold Spirit Jr., a 14-year-old aspiring cartoonist who lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation while attending an all-white high school.  

The book has faced pushback since it was published in 2007 and has been contested for its use of profanity, racist language including the N-word, and references to sexual acts. Over the past 15 years, the novel has earned a spot on the American Library Association’s banned books list six times.   

The novel is currently banned in 16 different school districts across a handful of states including Florida, Georgia, Iowa and Kansas, according to PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans. 

But this year’s efforts to ban Sherman’s work were different.  

One example of how pushback against Alexie’s National Book Award-winning work has changed shape is how the novel was contested in Nebraska earlier this year.  

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Several members of a group called the Protect Nebraska Children Coalition showed up to a Wauneta-Pallisade Public Schools board meeting in January demanding that a number of books be removed from elementary and high school libraries in part due to sexual content. “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” happened to be one of those books on the list.  

“The difference this time is it’s never been this organized. It was usually one or two parents in one school district,” Alexie said. “But this organizational effort has far more power and influence.” 

The group’s mission is to “protect the health and innocence of children and the fundamental rights of parents to direct the education, healthcare and upbringing of their children,” according to the Protect Nebraska Children Coalition Facebook page.  

The link to the group’s website listed on the Facebook page directs users to a page outlining the dangers of comprehensive sexuality education and features a step-by-step guide to remove CSE from schools by using a tactic called the “Tsunami Strategy.”  

There are four main parts to the “Tsunami Strategy,” according to the site. The first is to decide on a long-term policy goal, the second is to figure out “the oppositions” policy goals, followed by a short-term decision on what to address in the next school board public meeting and the last step is to “craft 30 statements all asking for the same action to be taken.” 

Some groups pushing for the removal or investigation of certain books for their content argue that they are doing so for the safety of children. But some like Ellen Hopkins, who is the most frequently banned author in the United States, according to PEN America, don’t believe that concern is real.  

“The current attacks are impersonal. No real concern for the welfare of the kids they claim to worry about,” said Hopkins.  

Hopkins added that she believes the ultimate goal of many pushing for these book bans is to “dismantle public education and drive teachers away from teaching.”  

According to PEN America, 14 individual books by Hopkins have been contested or outright banned in schools over the past year. The title with the most bans is the novel “Crank,” a story about addiction inspired by Hopkins’ daughter who went from being a straight-A student to battling a crystal meth addiction during her teen years.  

Hopkins speculates that some parents contesting work like “Crank” believe that if children read about drug use it might make them want to try illicit substances. But thinking that children are only learning about certain parts of life through books is naïve, she said.  

“I don’t know how they consider they wouldn’t know about it considering most of them have internet access,” Hopkins said. “Books are a safer space…if a kid has his nose in a book he’s not actually being courted by somebody or actually watching real people have sex.” 

Hopkins told Changing America that the purpose of the book is to help give insight into some of the problems that young people face every day and to help them make better choices. Taking that information away only increases the odds children will make poor choices if placed in similar situations, Hopkins argued.  

Hopkins said that she has even reached out to several groups contesting her books and asked to have a conversation and explain her motivation for writing on the topics that she does but none have taken her up on the offer.  

“The hysterics don’t want that understanding or difficult conversations,” Hopkins said. “They want attention and get it through rehearsed talking points.”  

When faced with an adult concerned about the content of her books, author Ashley Hope Perez will ask if their child has a cell phone or goes to the public library to use computers. 

“Even if they don’t have a cell phone, do they play on a soccer team? Do they ride the bus? Are they ever in the locker room?… there is always access to content,” Perez said. “Why are we removing access to high quality content to frame difficult conversations and leaving kids with nothing but what they find on the internet?” 

What is concerning about the newest wave of book bans is by using outrage over the contents of the books as a sort of “proxy war” against non-dominate identities like being queer or non-white, according to Perez.  

Perez said that she has logged on to Facebook pages of groups that have contested her young adult novel “Out of Darkness,” and has been shocked to see members tell others to “not talk about race” or bring up homosexuality when trying to push for a ban and instead “just talk about sex and curse words.” 

To her, comments like that reveal that targeting specific themes in books is just a pretext for targeting specific books that promote the inclusion of people of different races and sexual identities.  

“These groups know they cannot send parents to school board meetings to say I don’t want queer kids in my kid’s school. I don’t want them sitting next to a Black kid,” said Perez. “They can’t say those things in 2022 but they can hold up a copy of ‘Out of Darkness’ with the Black and Mexican main characters on the front and say this is filth.”  

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Source

RELATED CONTENT

• Penguin Random House erects billboards displaying work from LGBTQ+ writers in response to recent book bans
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• Maine school district votes against removal of one of the nation’s most-challenged books

Establishment Scientific Literature – Half Not True? – by Richard Horton (Lancet) Oct 2022

“A lot of what is published is incorrect.” I’m not allowed
to say who made this remark because we were asked
to observe Chatham House rules. We were also asked
not to take photographs of slides. Those who worked
for government agencies pleaded that their comments
especially remain unquoted, since the forthcoming UK
election meant they were living in “purdah”—a chilling
state where severe restrictions on freedom of speech
are placed on anyone on the government’s payroll. Why
the paranoid concern for secrecy and non-attribution?
Because this symposium—on the reproducibility and
reliability of biomedical research, held at the Wellcome
Trust in London last week—touched on one of the
most sensitive issues in science today: the idea that
something has gone fundamentally wrong with one of
our greatest human creations.
*
The case against science is straightforward: much of the
scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.
Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects,
invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts
of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing
fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has
taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put
it, “poor methods get results”. The Academy of Medical
Sciences, Medical Research Council, and Biotechnology
and Biological Sciences Research Council have now put
their reputational weight behind an investigation into
these questionable research practices. The apparent
endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their
quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often
sculpt data to fi t their preferred theory of the world. Or they
retrofit hypotheses to fi t their data. Journal editors deserve
their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst
behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels
an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few
journals. Our love of “significance” pollutes the literature
with many a statistical fairy-tale. We reject important
confirmations. Journals are not the only miscreants.
Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and
talent, endpoints that foster reductive metrics, such as
high-impact publication. National assessment procedures,
such as the Research Excellence Framework, incentivise
bad practices. And individual scientists, including their

most senior leaders, do little to alter a research culture that
occasionally veers close to misconduct.
*
Can bad scientific practices be fixed? Part of the
problem is that no-one is incentivised to be right.
Instead, scientists are incentivised to be productive
and innovative. Would a Hippocratic Oath for science
help? Certainly don’t add more layers of research red tape. Instead of changing incentives, perhaps one could
remove incentives altogether. Or insist on replicability
statements in grant applications and research papers.
Or emphasise collaboration, not competition. Or insist
on preregistration of protocols. Or reward better pre and
post publication peer review. Or improve research training
and mentorship. Or implement the recommendations
from our Series on increasing research value, published
last year. One of the most convincing proposals came
from outside the biomedical community. Tony Weidberg
is a Professor of Particle Physics at Oxford. Following
several high-profile errors, the particle physics community
now invests great eff ort into intensive checking and rechecking of data prior to publication. By filtering results
through independent working groups, physicists are
encouraged to criticise. Good criticism is rewarded. The
goal is a reliable result, and the incentives for scientists
are aligned around this goal. Weidberg worried we set
the bar for results in biomedicine far too low. In particle
physics, significance is set at 5 sigma—a p value of 3 × 10–7
or 1 in 3·5 million (if the result is not true, this is the
probability that the data would have been as extreme
as they are). The conclusion of the symposium was that
something must be done. Indeed, all seemed to agree
that it was within our power to do that something. But
as to precisely what to do or how to do it, there were no
fi rm answers. Those who have the power to act seem to
think somebody else should act first. And every positive
action (that is, funding well-powered replications) has a
counterargument (science will become less creative). The
good news is that science is beginning to take some of its
worst failings very seriously. The bad news is that nobody
is ready to take the first step to clean up the system.

Richard Horton
richard.h orton@lancet.com

……………….

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How Blatant Anti-White Racism Won Acceptance in Elite America – by John Murawski (RealClearInvestigations) 7 Sept 2022

In a 2021 lecture at Yale University titled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” psychiatrist Aruna Khilanani described her “fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a favor.”

Donald Moss: His scholarly article said whiteness is “a malignant, parasitic-like condition.” No cure, either.

apsa.org

Around the same time, a scholarly article in a peer-reviewed academic journal described “whiteness” as “a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility.” The author, Donald Moss, had also presented his paper as a continuing education course for licensed therapists who would presumably treat patients with this condition. The paper advises: “There is not yet a permanent cure.”

This is a sampling of the new racism that is gaining purchase in American society even as its advocates relentlessly punish speech they deem harmful and threatening to people of color. It parallels the acceptance of anti-male rhetoric that casts masculinity as “predatory” and “toxic,” or just casually demeans males as oafish and clueless, which allows the Washington Post to give a megaphone to Northeastern University professor Suzanna Danuta Walters to ask: “Why can’t we hate men?” (Her conclusion: We can and we should.)

The escalation of this inflammatory rhetoric is reaching the highest levels of American society, as when President Biden insinuated in a fiery campaign speech last week that Donald Trump supporters are “white supremacists” and when he maligned conservative mask skeptics last year for “Neanderthal thinking.” 

Aruna Khilanani: Spoke at Yale on “fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way.”

Twitter

What strikes a casual observer is that such language would be instantly denounced if it targeted racial minorities or other protected groups. Just as remarkable is that this new rhetoric is not coming from dropouts and loners at society’s margins; it is being advanced by successful professionals who have scaled the heights of respectability and are given a platform on social media and in prestigious cultural outlets.

And though each of those examples generated a public furor, such inflammatory rhetoric is defended or downplayed by cultural gatekeepers. The incidents have been piling up especially in the past few years, especially since the election of Donald Trump to the White House during the ascent of Black Lives Matter in the age of social media, and even include cases of people calling for the hate of privileged groups and insisting it’s not hate speech.

Suzanna Danuta Walters: Asked “Why can’t we hate men?” in the Washington Post. Her answer: We can and we should.

Northeastern University

In its ultimate sign of success, this messaging has taken hold in public schools, corporate workplaces, medical journals, scientific research and even diversity training in federal agencies. It’s not limited to any single race but endorsed by whites, blacks, Asians and others, and disseminated in diversity materials and workplace-recommended readings that characterize white people as flawed, predatory and dangerous to society. Its sudden spread has caused a sense of culture shock and given rise to acrimonious school board meetings and employee lawsuits over hostile work environments as legions of teachers, students and workers have been educated about white privilege, white fragility, white complicity, and the moral imperative to de-center “whiteness” so as not to “normalize white domination.”

This new take on speech produces a moral paradox, particularly among academics and journalists: Those who are most militant about policing what they deem to be hate speech against minorities, women, gays and trans communities are often the most tolerant of demeaning depictions, incendiary rhetoric and violent imagery against whites and men.

To those who see a double standard, such routine disparagement of masculinity and whiteness is a case study in hypocrisy that upends longstanding norms against stereotyping entire social groups. It’s a manifestation of what Columbia University linguist and social commentator John McWhorter dubbed “woke racism” in a 2021 book of the same name that warns of the dangerous spread of “the kinds of language, policies, and actions that Orwell wrote of as fiction.”

James Livingston, Rutgers historian: Derided “little Caucasian assholes who know their parents will approve of anything they do.”

Rutgers

But its advocates insist there is no double standard; they argue they are simply speaking truth to power, which should cause discomfort. In this belief system, reverse discrimination can’t exist because social justice demands tipping the scales to favor marginalized groups to correct for centuries of injustice.

They include Rutgers University historian James Livingston who, in a Facebook critique of gentrification, described a Harlem burger joint as being “overrun with little Caucasian assholes who know their parents will approve of anything they do. Slide around the floor, you little shithead, sing loudly you unlikely moron. Do what you want, nobody here is gonna restrict your right to be white.”

The post concluded: “I hereby resign from my race. Fuck these people. Yeah, I know, it’s about access to my dinner. Fuck you, too.”

In a phone call, Livingston, who is white, said his Facebook post was a joke targeted at white people who are privileged and therefore require less protection than marginalized groups.

“White males have been the norm of our culture and our politics and our society and our economy for so long that unearthing the unstated assumptions that go into that is pretty hard work, and it reveals things that make us uncomfortable,” Livingston said. “So do they need to be protected? I suppose. Everybody needs some protection. But I’m not too worried about people telling me that I have no right to speak on the issue of transgender individuals.”

Although Livingston was initially found in violation of Rutgers’ discrimination and harassment policy, Rutgers later reversed its decision, accepting his claim that his Facebook post was satire protected by academic freedom.

Festering for Decades

It can seem that such putdowns and trash talk have burst out of nowhere in the last few years. But the underlying justifications have been percolating for decades, and they are seen by skeptics as a modern repackaging of ancient us-versus-them tribal reflexes. Telltale signs of role-reversal have been described by serious thinkers, such as 19^th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote that “He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself.”

More recently, author Douglas Murray has warned of the tendency for social justice movements to “behave – in victory – as its opponents once did” – which is to say: meanly – and which ultimately results in “the normalization of vengefulness.”

Herbert Marcuse, Marxist scholar and precursor of woke intolerance: He argued the oppressor class and the oppressed cannot be held to the same standard.

Wikipedia

The idea that stereotyping and denigrating entire groups has no place in a society that strives for equality is one of the signature achievements of the Civil Rights era. By the 1970s, openly expressing racist slurs and jokes against black people was seen as a distasteful holdover from the Jim Crow era, an Archie Bunker-ism signifying low education and low intelligence.

The prohibition against racist speech rapidly became generalized to all identity groups. Ethnic slurs against Poles, Italians, Asians, and others became verboten as did mockery of gays and the disabled. Many words once commonly used to describe women, such as “dame” and “broad” became unacceptable, while terms that were once seen as neutral or descriptive, such as “colored,” “Oriental,” and “Negro,” suddenly took on negative connotations, and became unutterable in public (creating a replacement term, “people of color”).

But at the same time that these language taboos against expressing prejudice were becoming widely accepted across the political spectrum as a matter of civility, a far-more radical effort to regulate speech was percolating on the left.

This movement sought to limit speech on the rationale that language was a form of social control and therefore the source of oppression and violence. The assumption that hurtful language leads to harmful policies ultimately produced today’s cancel culture phenomenon, where otherwise well-regarded professionals are investigated, suspended, canned, or booted from social media for simply questioning the factual claims of Black Lives Matter, for affirming biological sex differences, for satirizing ritual land acknowledgements, and even for publicly saying the Mandarin word “nei-ge” (because it supposedly resembles a racial epithet in English).

The core proposition of this mindset can be traced to philosophers like Michel Foucault, who developed theories of language as a form of societal power and domination, and Herbert Marcuse, the Marxist scholar whose now-classic 1960s essay, “Repressive Tolerance,” argues that the oppressor class and the oppressed cannot be held to the same standard. Marcuse proposed that the classical liberal doctrine of free speech is a mechanism that benefits capitalists and others who wield power, that the struggle for “a real democracy” paradoxically necessitates “the fight against an ideology of tolerance.”

Stanley Fish: New York Times contributor wrote “The Harm in Free Speech.”

YouTube/Friction

The subversive intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s passed on the torch to Critical Race Theorists and radical feminists, and in the 1990s the critique of bourgeoisie liberalism was taken up by Stanley Fish, a post-modernist literary critic and critical legal scholar who ridiculed the idea of “free speech” and “reverse racism,” giving wider exposure to these esoteric scholarly arguments.

“By insisting that from now on there shall be no discrimination, they leave in place the effects of the discrimination that had been practiced for generations,” Fish wrote. “What is usually meant by perfect neutrality is a policy that leaves in place the effects of the discrimination you now officially repudiate. Neutrality thus perpetuates discrimination, rather than reversing it, for you can only fight discrimination with discrimination.”

During the Obama era, Fish was a celebrity public intellectual publishing pieces in the New York Times titled “Two Cheers for Double Standards” and “The Harm in Free Speech.”

Thus it came to be accepted that creating a just society will require controlling speech to disempower the historically privileged and empower aggrieved groups, and to undo sex, gender, and racial disparities in society.

At Georgetown University, for example, it means that academic freedom is balanced against an “equally important” competing goal – diversity and “equity,” the latter vaguely defined – which puts the two policies on a collision course.

Ilya Shapiro: Georgetown Law denounced his “demeaning” tweet criticizing Biden’s “black woman” litmus test for the Supreme Court. 

Cato Institute

Just this year, constitutional legal scholar Ilya Shapiro resigned from a plum job at Georgetown’s law school over a tweet in which Shapiro voiced his frustration that President Biden had promised to name a black woman to the Supreme Court. Shapiro recommended Indian-born federal jurist Sri Srinivasan and lamented that Biden’s racial litmus test meant he would instead nominate a “lesser black woman.” That phrase – which Shapiro subsequently described as “inartful” and for which he apologized, taking down the tweet – prompted an internal investigation by the university’s Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity & Affirmative Action.

Georgetown’s law dean denounced Shapiro’s January tweet as “demeaning” and “appalling,” but in his subsequent resignation letter Shapiro noted that Georgetown defended the academic freedom of a feminist professor when sent this tweet during Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 Supreme Court confirmation hearings:

“Look at this chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”

In a phone conversation, Shapiro said his experience serves as a reminder why free speech standards should apply uniformly to all citizens, rather than trying to compensate political identity groups based on theories of intersectional oppression. Such attempts end up being arbitrary, ideological, and political.

“Those kinds of theories are laughable,” said Shapiro, who is now director of constitutional studies at the conservative Manhattan Institute. “This idea of punching up and punching down, it all depends on definitions.”

C. Christine Fair: Georgetown Law defended the academic freedom of this feminist professor who advocated castrating white men’s corpses and feeding them to swine. 

Wikipedia

Shapiro said that definitions can be rigged, so that the term marginalized or underrepresented in the academic context never refers to conservatives or libertarians who constitute ideological minorities on campus and have been documented as being reluctant to express their opinions for fear of cancel culture.

“If you define it in ways that privileges your ideology, well then you’re going to get the output that you’re looking for in the first place,” Shapiro said. “It’s arguing that you’re rectifying a structural power dynamic when what you’re doing is shifting the power to favor your preferred group.”

It may come as a surprise that one of Shapiro’s defenders was Christine Fair, the Georgetown security studies professor who in 2018 had tweeted about castrating male corpses and feeding them to swine.

For starters, Fair said Shapiro’s tweet wasn’t offensive. But even if it was, she said, that shouldn’t matter: “We have no right not to be offended.”

Fair thrives on controversy and provocation. She has a blog called Tenacious Hellpussy, subtitled “A nasty woman posting from the frontlines of fuckery.” She publicly defended her 2018 tweet at the time, tweeting: “I will not use civil words to describe mass incivility. … I will use words that make you as uncomfortable as I am with this regime.”

“I detest cancel culture,” Fair said in a phone interview. “I don’t think they fundamentally understand freedom of speech. They think there is a right to freedom from speech.”

But what was her motive at the time to use such gratuitously graphic language that was guaranteed to blow up in her face? She summarized her motives as giving her political enemies a taste of their own medicine: “Let me show you what structural violence sounds like.”

Fair said that her 2018 tweet was not without grievous consequences. After receiving death threats and rape threats, her teaching duties were suspended for a year out of concerns for her physical safety. Even as she publicly defended her free speech rights to be provocative and outrageous, Fair “lugubriously apologized” to staff and faculty members who were subjected to online threats and “terrorized” by trolls because of Fair’s intemperate tweeting.

George Ciccariello-Maher, Drexel U.: “All I want for Christmas is white genocide.”

geomaher.com

Speech codes have been a staple of college campuses for decades but the stakes intensified after Donald Trump was elected president and the nation underwent a social transformation that some call the Great Awokening. Seemingly overnight the bar for permissible speech rose for the oppressor and dropped for the oppressed. And now it was overtly about politicizing and weaponizing speech to save humanity from itself.

On Christmas Eve in 2016, just weeks before Trump took office, a Drexel University political science professor, George Ciccariello-Maher, pulled an attention-getting stunt on Twitter: “All I want for Christmas is white genocide.”

The next day, the provocative professor pushed the nuclear buttons again: “To clarify: when the whites were massacred during the Haitian revolution, that was a good thing indeed.”

Drexel officials denounced the professor’s comments as “utterly reprehensible” and “utterly disturbing,” and subsequently put him on administrative leave (for his own safety). The professor denounced Drexel’s response as “chilling” to his academic freedom.

Ciccariello-Maher was just getting started. He went on the offensive in 2017 against free speech advocacy and took pride in being involved in a campaign to shout down conservative speaker Charles Murray.

“We’re actually fighting a battle,” Ciccariello-Maher said on a 2017 podcast, “and for that battle we need to use weapons, and we need to fight against the enemies that we have.”

He proclaimed: “We make a mistake from the beginning when we assume that speech is and has been free instead of a terrain for hegemonic struggle.”

A year after his controversial tweets, Ciccariello-Maher resigned from Drexel, citing nonstop harassment and threats from right-wing, white supremacist media outlets and internet mobs.

The changing dynamic played out in public view at the New York Times in 2018, when the media organization hired and then quickly un-hired opinion writer Quinn Norton for several gaffes, including retweeting a tweet with the N-word and fraternizing with an alleged neo-Nazi.

Ezra Klein, New York Times podcaster: The meme #KillAllMen really just means “it would be nice if the world sucked less for women.”

MSNBC

Just six months after tossing Norton, the New York Times stood by another opinion writer, Sarah Jeong, a Korean-born graduate of U Cal Berkeley and Harvard law school whose Twitter oeuvre trafficked in crude racial stereotypes. Jeong, who was fond of the hashtag #CancelWhitePeople, tweeted out such sentiments as: “White people have stopped breeding. you’ll all go extinct soon. that was my plan all along.” And: “Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.”

As the New York Times was pilloried for its double standard, progressive digital pundits at Vox came to Jeong’s defense, patiently explaining for the umpteenth time that Jeong was to be exempt from censure because “there’s no such thing as ‘reverse racism.’”

Ezra Klein, the former editor of Vox who’s now an influential podcaster at the Times, accused Jeong’s critics of “an absurd form of literalism.” He said the public misguidedly interpreted the online meme #KillAllMen literally, when Twitter habitués who are in on the joke understood that it really meant nothing more than “it would be nice if the world sucked less for women.”

Another Vox writer dismissed the idea that we should all play by the same rules and spelled out how the “social justice left” approaches the world: “What makes these quasi-satirical generalizations about ‘white people’ different from actual racism is, yes, the underlying power structure in American society.”

“There is no sense of threat associated with Jeong making a joke about how white people have dog-like opinions,” the Vox piece said. “But when white people have said the same about minorities, it has historically been a pretext for violence or justification for exclusionary politics.”

Many Americans are still trying to figure out the boundaries of acceptable speech at a time when striving for colorblindness and equal treatment mark a person as part of the problem. However sensible it might have seemed a half-century ago as a corrective measure or to alleviate pangs of guilt, the creation of separate standards for different groups now strikes some as profoundly regressive.

“The development of two separate language codes, one for whites and one for blacks, was ominous,” the conservative writer Christopher Caldwell observed in his 2020 book, “The Age of Entitlement.”

“The rules of American public decorum now resembled medieval strictures that permitted only noblemen to carry weapons or ride horses, or laws that forbade certain classes of citizens to address others by a certain name.”

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Email: jmurawski@realclearinvestigations.com
Twitter: @johnmurawski

Women and the East German Deformed Workers State (Spartakist) 2010 – Mp3 (55:01 min)

Women and the East German Deformed Workers State (Spartakist) 2010 – Mp3 (55:01 min)

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One Hour of East German Music – DDR

UK: Anti-monarchy protesters hold demonstrations on day of Queen’s funeral (Prime News Print) 20 Sept 2022

Around 50 protesters demonstrated in Windrush Square, Brixton, this afternoon (Picture: Harrison Jones)

Revolutionaries Protest the Monarchy – Spartacist

Dozens of republicans have protested against the Royal Family in south London on the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral.

Around 50 demonstrators shouted ‘down with the monarchy’ at a peaceful event organised by revolutionary communists the Sparticist League this afternoon.

Metres away from a sign reading ‘RIP Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’ at Brixton’s Ritzy Cinema, protesters blasted wall-to-wall coverage of the monarch’s death ‘being shoved down our throats’ and hit out at the money being spent on her state funeral.

Organisers also slated the Labour left – including former leader Jeremy Corbyn – and trade union leaders who cancelled strikes as ‘lackeys of the ruling class’.

The event – thought by organisers to be the only one of its kind in London today – passed almost entirely peacefully.

But at one point members of the public said they saw scuffles with bystanders who tried to take placards away from the demonstrators.

Meanwhile, in Cardiff, a similar protest saw signs reading ‘not my King’ and ‘cancel royals’.

Rajia Dajani, from Wimbledon, told Metro.co.uk from Brixton’s Windrush Square that she felt grief was being ‘enforced on the whole country’.

Anti-monarchy protesters outside Cardiff Castle made a similar point (Picture: SWNS)

The history of the ‘Prince of Wales’ title is controversial in Wales (Picture: SWNS)

The 41-year-old chef argued: ‘This institution of the monarchy is very, very bad for this country, it represents everything that is wrong with our society… That people should be organised in hierarchies and that these people [the Royals] who are apparently a different stock to us should be in a very, very powerful privileged position, not on merit but simply because they are born into it.’

Asked about whether demonstrating today was disrespectful, she suggested recent media focus should have been elsewhere rather than on the Queen, adding people who cannot afford to heat their homes this winter ‘will die’.

Ms Dajani also criticised the effusive praise for the monarch, adding: ‘She gave speeches, she cut some ribbons and she did some charity work, which is the least we should have expected from somebody in that powerful, privileged position.’

It comes as world leaders and dignitaries from around the globe descended on London for the historic event, following the death of the 96-year-old on September 8.

The demonstration was set against the backdrop of a tribute to the Queen at the nearby Ritzy Cinema (Picture: Harrison Jones)

Demonstrators hit out at media coverage of the Queen’s death (Picture: Harrison Jones)

Protesters also took aim at other leftists, who they felt have praised the late monarch too much (Picture: Harrison Jones)

The late monarch has been lying in state in Westminster Hall for the past few days, with hundreds of thousands of people lining up in ‘The Queue’ to pay their respects.

But with Britain facing a host of major problems, including a cost-of-living crisis battering household budgets, protesters suggested there had been too much focus on the monarch in the days following her death.

One man, 24, who asked to remain anonymous, told Metro.co.uk: ‘I think it’s ridiculous that the British taxpayer, after being squeezed so much by austerity for 12 years, is now expected to fork out for a state funeral to one of the richest families in the country. They should foot their bill.’

His friend, also a 24-year-old Londoner who works a service job, added: ‘Workers are missing shifts today because everywhere is closed.

‘For people on salaries, you get an extra bank holiday [but workers whose business is closed aren’t paid].

A number of other issues were raised at the demonstration (Picture: Harrison Jones)

There have been fears among royalists that the death of Elizabeth and the accession of her son King Charles, could give republicanism a boost (Picture: Harrison Jones)

‘It is the working class that are paying for the funeral.’

Royalists have long held fears thatthe death of Elizabeth II, followed by King Charles taking to the throne, could give republicanism a boost in the UK.

The movement is also growing abroad, particularly in former colonies – some of which, including Barbados, have already moved away from having a foreign monarch as their head of state.

Rights groups and freedom of speech campaigners have criticised heavy-handed police tactics towards anti-monarchist demonstrators in the wake of the Queen’s death.

Some have been threatened with arrest and charged for holding blank pieces of paper or shouting at Prince Andrew respectively.

But there were very few officers at this afternoon’s demonstration – amid one of the largest policing operations in British history for the funeral.

The Metropolitan Police declined to comment on the protest when contacted by Metro.co.uk, but there do not appear to have been any arrests.

Eibhlin McDonald, a spokesperson for the Sparticist League, which is part of the International Communist League, told the website: ‘We think it is important to oppose the monarchy.

‘As opponents of British imperialism, we think that the voices of those in this country who are opposed to the monarchy need to be heard and it needs to be heard today.

‘For a week and a half we have had a barrage of royalist, monarchist propaganda shoved down our throats.

‘It is obscene, people are sick of it, and as revolutionaries we think that this is a very basic fundamental point.’

Questioned about whether the event should have taken place today, Ms McDonald asked: ‘If not now, when?’

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https://archive.ph/RWaHT

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UK: Queen’s Funeral – Revolutionaries Protest, Reformists Prostrate (Workers Hammer) 22 Sept 2022

Audio of Article – Mp3 Machine Read

The Spartacist League is proud to say that on the day of
Elizabeth II’s funeral, we successfully organised the only
demonstration against the monarchy in London. Over 100
people responded to our call. A small number, certainly, but
every single person who was there knew that to simply show up
required swimming hard against the stream, braving potential
threats of arrest and attack by monarchists. While all so-called
socialist and republican organisations stayed home, paying the
ultimate homage to Her Majesty, those who came can proudly
say that they took a stand, defiantly chanting, “Down with
the monarchy!”—in Windrush Square, Brixton. Our modest
demonstration was the only organised outlet for the growing
disgust at the depravity of the British monarchy and the crimes
of British imperialism.

Speeches at the demonstration included one by a Greek comrade denouncing the reactionary role of British imperialism in
subordinating Greece. A US comrade motivated the need for
a third American revolution to sweep away US imperialism
and racial oppression, invoking the first revolution against
British rule and the second against slavery. A statement from
a Quebec comrade was read denouncing the British monarchy
as “the cornerstone of Québec’s national oppression”. Greetings from our comrades in South Africa stressed that “with
the blessing of ‘God and the monarchy’, racist colonialist pigs
like Cecil Rhodes carved up southern Africa, dispossessing
the native peoples of their land and dividing them according
to the needs of Britain’s rulers”.

Our main speaker denounced “the monarchy and the United
Kingdom” as “a prison for Scotland, Wales and Northern
Ireland’s Catholics” and King Charles III as the “colonel-inchief of the brutal Parachute Regiment that shot and killed 14
people on Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972”. She hammered on
the urgency of workers opposing the monarchy, taking power
and running the country.

Crucially, we directed our fire at the trade union leaders
and Labour lefts who claim to stand against the monarchy
and for the working class but who disgustingly mourned
the Queen, with abject eulogies or by criminally cancelling
strikes. One of the most popular chants at the demo was
“Starmer, Corbyn, TUC: crawling to the monarchy!”
We do note one who did not crawl: Steve Hedley, formerly
a leader of the RMT. While he could not attend, we appreciated the message he sent us, despite our political differences.

His message, read at the rally, called the TUC “boot lickers”
for cancelling strikes and noted, “When the Labour Party and
much of the so called revolutionary left and even so called
republicans acquiesced by their silence a small band of rebels
kept the flag flying.”

A few rebels also took a stand in Cardiff and Edinburgh.
But in London, the fact that only we and a small number of
bravehearts came out is a condemnation of the British left.
The Queen’s funeral was one of the largest gatherings of capitalist masters, imperialist overlords and crowned heads ever
seen. All these criminals covered in blood descended on London from the four corners of the earth to pay their respects to
the British monarchy — the embodiment of one of the most
brutal and reactionary empires in all human history. It was
crucial to take a stand against this carnival of reaction.
But the rest of the “socialist” groups not only did nothing,
they boycotted our demonstration. We invited left groups and
MPs in London and beyond and none of them even dared to
re-tweet our call. This from people who always accuse us of
being sectarians.

One argument we have heard to justify this abstention was
that while all socialists supposedly oppose the monarchy,
the cost-of-living crisis was more important. What a pathetic
excuse! One has to be wilfully blind not to see that it is precisely the trade union leaders’ bowing to the Crown which
poured cold water on workers’ struggle. The task of socialists
is precisely to make clear the connection between the destruction of the standard of living of working people and the domination of a parasitic ruling class — best embodied by the royal
family. Sweeping away this rot is the only way to solve the
current crisis.

Those “socialists” who refuse to take a stand against the
monarchy under the pretext that it is less of a priority than
the price of energy will never achieve anything for the working class. Even fighting for the most modest reforms requires
hard, militant class struggle. As our rally speaker insisted: “A
leadership that is too spineless to oppose the monarchy will
never have the backbone to confront the ruling class of this
country.”

But the real reason why groups like the Socialist Workers
Party, Socialist Appeal, the Socialist Party and other supposed
“revolutionaries” boycotted our demonstration is not found in
faulty logic but in the syphilitic chain of Labourism. All these
groups have spent the last months building the authority and
credentials of trade union tops like Mick Lynch, Sharon Graham and Dave Ward. They have spent years building good
relations with left-Labourite MPs like Sultana or Corbyn,
boosting their authority among workers. They think this is
what “socialist” work consists of. The last thing they want is
to destroy all this by calling the left Labourites’ bowing to the
Queen by its right name: betrayal. Doing so would instantly
make them outcasts in “respectable” Labourite circles and
most likely split their organisations. To take such a stand was
precisely what was posed in joining our demonstration.
The death of the Queen, just like the other major events
of recent years, was a test for those who claim to be fighting
for socialism. On one side were those who fought and took
a stand against the bourgeoisie, their monarch, their royalist
media and their servants in the ranks of the workers movement. On the other side were those who bowed to Crown and
Capital and made all sorts of excuses for doing so. Those of
us who were in Brixton on September 19 know which side we
are on.

— Spartacist League/Britain
22 September 2022

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US: Do ‘Unfair Labor Practice’ Strikes vs Stopping Capitalist Profits (13:39 min) Audio Mp3

US: Do ‘Unfair Labor Practice’ Strikes Bypass the Obstacles Workers Labor Unions Face When Fighting Their Boss? – by Justin Harrison – 30 Sept 2022

Audio of Article – Mp3

By Justin Harrison, elected union officer in CWA 13000, currently retired, written in a personal capacity

It’s clear to everyone who’s fought back against their boss that labor law overwhelmingly favors the employers. While workers in the U.S. have the legal ‘right’ to join a union and engage in ‘concerted protected activity’ and strikes to pressure their boss on a wide range of issues, generations of National Labor Board rulings, Supreme Court decisions, and other case law precedents severely restrict these rights in practice.

Because of all the legal, political, and economic barriers to effective workplace direct action, established unions and unorganized workers are more frequently turning to Unfair Labor Practice (or ULP) strikes to disrupt business as usual and force an employer to settle disputes on our terms. A long, drawn out, open-ended ‘one day longer, one day stronger’ strike carries risks and hardships. On this basis, it’s argued that ULP strikes are a smarter way to strike and that a ULP strike is a legal loophole through the limitations and uncertainty of an economic strike since it invokes certain legal protections for striking workers and unions that an economic strike does not.

While there can be real advantages to using a ULP strike, this article will argue that at the end of the day, there are no shortcuts. The key question is what combination of job actions, strikes, and political pressure will force the employer to make the concessions we need to make our lives better – or, as socialists often say, to tip the balance of class forces. This means developing a sober power analysis and building workplace, community, and political organizing to address identified weaknesses and build the union’s power and ability to fight and win a short, sharp strike – whether economic or a ULP. The question is not ‘Should we go out on a short ULP strike instead of an open ended economic strike?’ but, ‘Will a ULP strike build our power and help win our demands?’

Earlier this month, the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA) went out on a three-day ULP strike. The ULP strategy helped nurses from 14 hospitals (with 14 separate contracts) go out on strike all at the same time, resulting in the largest nursing strike in U.S. history. They hoped to use the size of the strike to overwhelm the hospitals’ ability to hire enough scabs – but the hospital administrators used their massive profits to pay scabs $10,000 a week to keep hospitals running. 

When bargaining resumed, the hospitals had not budged on the key demands. While the fight is far from over and Minnesota nurses are discussing how to escalate the struggle, evaluating the tactic of the ULP strike is essential as other healthcare workers, like nurses and professional staff at Temple University Hospital, are actively debating their strategy to win wages, safe staffing, and other demands in their next contract. 

How is a ULP strike different from a basic economic strike? A ULP strike is a strike provoked by an employer’s legally documented specific violation of the rules of engagement, such as refusing to provide a union with requested information, repeated contract violations, failure to bargain ‘in good faith,’ or disciplining people for union activity. Since the legal penalties are so minimal, employers violate labor law all the time, and there is usually no shortage of issues that a union or even unorganized workers can strike over and claim a ULP.

The Limitations Of The ‘Legal Strike’

Strikers walking a picket line under the watchful eye of the police and their employer’s private security services are forced to let scabs cross their line and steal their work or face being fired for ‘strike misconduct.’ ‘Wildcat’ strikes, partial strikes (including work slowdowns), intermittent strikes and sit-down (occupation) strikes are all ‘unprotected,’ which means workers can be disciplined or fired without legal recourse for engaging in these actions. 

A quick read of the National Labor Relations Act reveals that while workers are ‘guaranteed’ the legal right to join a union and strike, the overwhelming emphasis of the law is on prohibiting any effective tactics and strategies historically used by workers to win strikes. The Labor Board and various court rulings are explicitly clear that the reason these kinds of actions are illegal is because they are so effective at disrupting business as usual. For example, in Automobile Workers v. Wisconsin Board, the court ruled that “to make the [ability to] strike an absolute right… the effect would be to legalize… not only the intermittent stoppages such as we have here, but also the slowdown, and perhaps the sit-down, strike as well.” In the case of occupations and sit-down strikes, the Supreme Court has ruled that they are an unconstitutional expropriation of the employers’ property.

On top of all this, while you theoretically can’t be fired for engaging in a legal strike, the law lets employers ‘permanently replace’ strikers instead, a legal sleight of hand allowed by the Supreme Court that amounts to the same thing – you still lost your job!. Even when you do everything right and follow all the rules, the boss can still fire you and make you fight it out in court. The burden of proof is on the union or individual to prove that the employer fired them for protected union activity and not some other reason such as violating a work rule or calling out sick too often. 

While Biden’s labor board (allegedly the most ‘pro-union’ NLRB in a generation) has moved marginally faster than Trump’s, workers illegally fired for union activity have often waited years to get their jobs back. The ‘Memphis 7’ finally got their jobs back 8 months after being fired for union activity, but over 100 Starbucks workers who have been illegally fired for union organizing have been given no respite by the NLRB. Even when the NLRB rules in favor of a union, employers with deep pockets can sue individual workers, unions, and even the NLRB itself and fight it all the way to the Supreme Court.

Put all this together and U.S. labor law is some of the most restrictive in the world. With extremely narrow legal protections for workers, not just on direct actions like strikes but on free speech as well. The wrong trigger word said in the wrong context can mean the difference in a workplace action being judged as legal or illegal and consequently ‘unprotected.’

In many cases, it’s our own union leadership and lawyers that hold us back for fear of having to fight a long uphill battle through the courts while strikers are starved into submission, or of the union being fined for ‘breaking the rules.’ This often results in a hypervigilant monitoring by a union of its own members’ activities, speech, and social media, and an over reliance on the ‘legality’ of a strike with the lawyers reviewing all press messaging, slogans, picket signs, and other material.  

All this legal calculus minimizes the fact that our real power flows from our control of production and our ability to hurt the boss where it counts – in their wallet – by shutting down operations. There are many examples from recent history of militant strikes that ‘followed all the rules’ but failed to stop production, and ended in bitter defeat after a long fight on the picket line and in the courts. While the legal complications are real and we shouldn’t be dismissive of them, the conservative ‘by the rules’ approach of many union officials and staff locks most strikes into a ‘one day longer’ battle of attrition between the employer and the union, a battle the employer is uniquely suited to win, as opposed to adopting a clear strategy of escalation.

The “Unfair Labor Practice” Strike

There can be real advantages to conducting a ULP strike instead of an economic strike. The biggest advantage is that workers involved in a ULP strike cannot be ‘permanently replaced,’ as the employer is legally obligated to rehire all strikers at the end of the strike. For nonunion workers, a ULP is often the only kind of strike they can organize and be reasonably sure they will get their job back afterwards. In 2012-2014 during the ‘Fight For 15’ campaign, SEIU organized national ‘days of action’ and one day strikes using ULPs to protect individuals and small groups of workers who walked off the job in various non-unionized fast food and retail restaurants (as part of a broader public campaign, the nonunion workers were walked back to work the next day surrounded by activists, lawyers, and local politicians to make sure they didn’t get fired).

But ULP strikes replace the problems of  ‘one day longer, one day stronger’ with a new set of tactical and political problems. A time-limited ULP strike may feel safer and less risky than an open-ended strike, but letting the boss know the duration of the strike up front makes it easy for them to prepare by hiring scabs and stockpiling materials. A ULP strike cannot, legally, be linked to any of the broader issues at stake such as contract demands. This limits what the union can say openly about the strike which makes it harder to mobilize union members and build broader community solidarity. 

If the employer agrees to settle the specific ULP, the union must call off the strike even if none of their other demands have been met. If the union is using the ULP as part of a broader bargaining strategy, this means going back to work after the strike with none of the other core issues settled. Violating these rules, even accidentally, opens the union to counter charges by the employer against the union which can end up with the strike being found illegal by the NLRB.  Repeatedly striking over different ULPs – or going on an economic strike after a short ULP strike –  may be determined to be an illegal intermittent strike. A final determination of whether or not a specific strike is a valid ULP strike is made after the fact by the NLRB, sometimes years later if it gets tied up in the courts. 

In 1995, the Detroit News newspaper unions filed ULPs and went on strike against the aggressive demands of the owners for serious concessions. The strikers used a lot of creative tactics to bring pressure on the employer but fundamentally stayed within the legal rules and did not stop scabs from crossing the picket lines. Two years later, the unions called off the strike, with many of their members having lost their jobs after being permanently replaced even though the NLRB had ruled in favor of the strikers. The boss took the NLRB to court and in 2000, 5 years after the start of the strike and 3 years after it ended, the federal courts overturned the ULPs, leaving hundreds of workers out in the cold without their jobs, healthcare, and pensions.

No Shortcuts – Strikes Have to Disrupt Profits to Win

Particularly in education, healthcare, and other essential public services, strikes rapidly become politically significant as their impact spreads through working class communities. Intentionally fighting for demands that are not just narrowly focused on the workers’ wages and conditions, but improve the affordability, accessibility, and safety of these services for the communities served is critical for building a broad base of public support for the strike and brings political and economic pressure on the employer to settle.

A ULP strike can be effective when used as part of an overall strategy to win clear demands, along with safety strikes, grievance strikes, and economic strikes. Like any good tool, it has its specific use and is not a one-size-fits-all solution to overcome the legal barriers to effective action. We shouldn’t be afraid to use all the tools at our disposal to strike effectively, but we should be clear that just as there is no safety in staying within the tight legal constraints of a ‘one day longer, one day stronger’ economic strike, there is no magical protection in a ULP strike. 

The overall experience of generations of class struggle teaches us that the opposite is true. A far more important factor is a union leadership prepared to lead from the front, mobilizing their resources to stop scabs and shut down production. This means challenging the boss’ courts, police, and politicians. It also means engaging, preparing, and mobilizing rank and file union members for the political, legal, and economic challenges of an effective strike, whether it’s a ULP or an economic strike. The Labor Board and the courts are not here to ‘protect us’ but to regulate strikes and other workplace conflicts in the interests of the individual employer and the overall stability of the capitalist economic system.  

When confident, aggressive leadership has challenged the employer and the courts, supported the militant actions of workers on the picket line to defy court injunctions, and organized mass pickets to block scabs and shut down operations, they have been able to win. In 1994, Ron Carey led the Teamsters in a wildcat safety strike against UPS when the company unilaterally doubled the weight limit of packages to 150 pounds. Carey’s national leadership team had to confront the courts, the bosses and corrupt local union officials who publicly undercut and scabbed on the strike. 

Despite these complications, 90,000 Teamsters took the strike to the streets and effectively shut down UPS’ operations in the North East and key Midwest cities. Carey publicly defied the massive political pressure, court injunctions and million dollar fines and threatened to escalate instead of backing down. Within 24 hours the strike was over. UPS withdrew most of its lawsuits and agreed to the union’s terms. While some legalities of the strike were tied up in the courts and settled years later the union had already won where it counted, in the workplace.

Winning a strike (or winning a strong contract without striking) is not just about good organizing or a clever approach to the law. It’s about recognizing the core class conflict involved – the irreconcilable differences of interest between worker and employer – and seizing every opening to aggressively fight for our demands even if it means breaking the law.

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https://archive.ph/vicPS

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