Geopolitical Outlook

Left to right: Juvénal Habyarimana (Republic of Rwanda) and Slobodan Milošević (Yugoslavia and Serbia); photos taken some time during the 1980's.  “What would happen if capitalism succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries. The working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.” [1]  —J.V. Stalin, 1926  Such are the prophetic words of Joseph Stalin; and indeed, that is what happened throughout much of the 1990's after the demise of the Soviet Union: a series of U.S. imperial aggressions which went unchecked, with little to no challenge, and with increasing brute force. The CIA-backed Mujahideen succeeded in overthrowing the progressive, Soviet-aligned People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan in 1992, which not only caused Afghanistan's living standards to drop rapidly and made th...

[Note: Below is a brief excerpt from a section of my upcoming essay that has yet to be published.] After the fall of Kabul in 1992, but some time before the Taliban came to power, the reactionary tribal chiefs had taken over the Afghan countryside and ordered farmers to begin planting opium poppy, which had been outlawed by the Taraki government. Prior to that, the Pakistani ISI set up hundreds of heroin laboratories at the behest of the CIA so that by 1981, the Pakistani-Afghan border became the largest producer of heroin in the world. It is then apparent that by putting an end to the cultivation of opium poppy, in addition to using the country’s resources to modernize and uplift its own population, the independent nationalist government of the PDPA (People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan) was seen as a threat to U.S. interests that needed to be eliminated [1]. After all, it was during the 1970’s that drug trafficking  served as the CIA’s primary source of funding for param...

An oft-misunderstood subject matter that has been made cheap fodder for imperialist and anti-Soviet propaganda is the Berlin Wall, which stood from 1961 to 1989. One of the most common misconceptions -- or rather, widespread myths -- is that West Germany was in need of protection, re-arming, and was the "victim" of "East German and Soviet aggression," and that the wall was supposedly a symbol of "communist oppression" and proof of a " totalitarian Iron Curtain". In reality, the wall was built for the defense, security, and protection of the independent East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR) from the threats coming from West Germany, who were essentially NATO proxy forces and were led by a Western-backed puppet government. There were also fears coming from the GDR of a return or resurgence of Fascism. As was already mentioned in my previous blog entry, " NATO, a Brief History ," the political partitioning of Germany w...

Following the April 1949 signing of the Atlantic Pact and led by then-U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was founded by 12 member states in London on May 18th, 1950 . Their purpose, as they claimed, was their dedication to "the preservation of peace" and to the defense of Western Europe against supposed military threats. Not only did the creation coincide with the heightened tensions of the Cold War and the political partitioning of Germany, but it also extended its invitation to West Germany to join the fold on May 9th, 1954 with the intent of re-arming it. This was a violation of the 1945 Potsdam agreement which posited that the partition of Germany was supposed to be temporary and that all of Germany was to be ' de-Nazified '; instead, we saw the development of West Germany into a Western puppet state. The Soviet Union saw the aforementioned invitation to West Germany and its re-arming as a provocation and, in th...

“It is characteristic of capitalism in general that the ownership of capital is separated from the application of capital to production, that money capital is separated from industrial or productive capital, and that the rentier who lives entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur and from all who are directly concerned in the management of capital. Imperialism, or the domination of finance capital, is that highest stage of capitalism in which this separation reaches vast proportions. The supremacy of finance capital over all other forms of capital means the predominance of the rentier and of the financial oligarchy; it means that a small number of financially “powerful” states stand out among all the rest. The extent to which this process is going on may be judged from the statistics on emissions, i.e., the issue of all kinds of securities.”  —V.I. Lenin, 1916 (from Ch. III "Finance Capital and the Financial Oligarchy")  A glob...