Geopolitical Outlook

Compulsory vaccination on collective farm in Turkmenistan. Photograph by Soviet Photo Agency. Found in Sir Arthur Newsholme's 1932 book, Red Medicine: Socialized Health in Soviet Russia .   Despite all advances made in modern medicine, and the fact that vaccination has consistently been shown to be one of the most cost-effective ways of avoiding infection, why do irrational fears of modern medicine still persist? And since when did it become acceptable for calls for “herd immunity” and homeopathy fads, which are based in mysticism, to be presented as substitutes for defending or advocating public healthcare? Vaccines, which have historically been shown to dramatically improve human health and quality of life by helping to eradicate many diseases, should be seen as a collective and social responsibility to protect one another and millions from illness. This was exemplified by the Soviet public health system where vaccinations were made compulsory in April 1919 because “the health ...

Those who vehemently oppose the lockdowns and aggressively advocate that state of emergency measures be lifted prematurely tend to push and hold most if not all of these extremely confused and contradictory narratives: 1) Sue China, everything is their fault, they created the Coronavirus, etc. 2) The virus is not real. The pandemic is a hoax and the lockdowns are "authoritarian,", "fascist", and/or "totalitarian". 3) Praise Sweden for their "herd immunity", no-lockdown approach where "no one has died". 4) It's just like the flu. Everyone is just overreacting. Those people who died were really old or unhealthy anyway. 5) The flu is more deadly, more people die from it. The deaths are exaggerated and/or have been falsified to claim that this patient died from the Coronavirus! Nevermind the fact that "herd immunity" -- which 'anti-lockdown' libertarians advocate for without a vaccine -- reeks o...

The original headquarters of Radio Televizija Srbije (RTS) in Belgrade, Serbia. The building was hit with a missile on April 23, 1999 during NATO's 78-day air bombing raid of Yugoslavia; 16 employees were killed during the attack. To this day, and as pictured above, the building remains the same as it was on the day it was fire-bombed. If there is one thing that the late Slobodan Milosevic should regret, it is agreeing to travel to Rambouillet in the first place for the U.S.-led "peace talks" and "negotiations" that took place between February 6, 1999 and March 22, 1999. He of course rightfully rejected the terms of the Rambouillet ultimatum and, as he mentioned in a personal conversation with his defense lawyer Christopher Black, told the United States to "go fuck themselves" (sic). The terms were completely abhorrent and objectionable because they essentially were tantamount to blackmailing Yugoslavia (or whatever was left of it) into opening ...

Sabaa Bahrat Square in Damascus, Syria. The following below is an addendum to and expansion of the second paragraph of the previous blog entry, " Geopolitical Context Matters pt. 2 - Slouching Towards Syria ". Generally speaking, the West -- but especially America -- is a bastion of ignorance when it comes to the Arab and Muslim world, with two extremes: the right-wing who see Islam as a race (rather than a religion) and a civilizational threat and equate all Muslims with Osama bin Laden. While the liberals and the 'left' also see Islam as a race and think that Wahhabism is just a mere expression of victimhood. Contrary to a popular narrative that is uncritically accepted by Western liberals and leftists, Wahhabism is not an expression of victimhood. Sunni Muslims are also not inherently or naturally predisposed to such an ideology. While racism, xenophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiment is rife with far-right circles who take a racially-charged approach and t...

Hollywood celebrities invest in stocks and bonds, accumulating capital in various ways, and have ownership in certain markets. They are not productive workers and do not actually create or generate any value. In fact, their disproportionately high wages come from the musicians who play the instruments,  those who do the sound-engineering, and those who write their songs for them -- if they are singers; in which case, it helps their brand if they place their names in the list of songwriters, even if they wrote little to none of the content. If they are Hollywood actors, it comes from those who write their scripts and work on the set production. Not only that, but the surplus value that is generated comes from consumers who buy their products. And if they have clothing lines and other merchandises attached to their names, they often rely on superexploitative sweatshop labour in Third World countries. Of course, there are some famous entertainers who don't even do anything th...

Stephen Corry recently had his article, " Too Many Africans? ", published; it details how environmental destruction, poverty, and economic crises are rooted in the imperialist nations’ problems of overconsumption and unequal wealth distribution, not "overpopulation". The neo-Malthusian narrative about “useless eaters” and that the world has an “overpopulation” problem is beneficial to the capitalist class because when all focus and blame is shifted away from the contradictions of capitalism and onto such distractions, their profits are protected. While commercial exploitation of poorer countries’ water, food, labour, and resources is the real problem — as opposed to “overpopulation" — the capitalist class will always turn around and pin the blame on the people of those countries, and claim that they are starving because they “ breed like rabbits ” (to borrow an infamous phrase, regarding the 1943 Bengal famine, from Winston Churchill). As for independent n...

The Soviet Operation Bagration which began on June 22, 1944 was one of the largest offenses in scale and one of the most decisive operations in all of World War II. It dwarfed the D-Day landings in terms of scale and the significant amount of damage it inflicted upon the Wehrmacht, which helped pave the way for the Red Army’s victory in the Battle of Berlin a year later. World War II historical revisionism by the imperialist nations, but especially by the United States, has long been a staple since the Cold War era. It always manifests itself in diminishing the major contributions, achievements, and immense sacrifices of the Soviet Union — while attempting to portray the U.S. as the “heroes” who carried the full weight of the war, often exaggerating its role despite being the latecomers and having made  business deals with the Nazis  prior to joining the Allies in battle. Efforts to erase the leading role that the Soviet Union played still continue today. Whether it be the ...

Ben Norton recently published an article on The Grayzone  titled " New NATO-approved US monument honors fascist Lithuanian Nazi collaborator as anti-Soviet hero " (which I highly recommend reading). In this article, Norton comments on the monument that was recently unveiled in Chicago, which honours Lithuanian Nazi collaborator and unabashed anti-Soviet war hawk, Adolfas Ramanauskas (a.k.a. "Vanagas"). The ceremony for the unveiling, held on May 4th, honours Ramanauskas as a "freedom fighter" and a "hero", as Norton writes, Lithuania’s state-funded Genocide and Resistance Research Centre has spent the past nearly three decades fueling Holocaust revisionism by portraying Nazi-collaborating Lithuanian fascists who murdered Jews in the Holocaust as anti-communist resistance heroes, while depicting Jewish anti-fascist partisans as war criminals; and by advancing the “double genocide” theory that falsely equates Soviet atrocities with Nazi cr...

Minnesota's Democratic representative and Congresswoman  Ilhan Omar has been making headlines lately because of the seemingly "anti-establishment" remarks she made in Washington and has become popular among some Western 'progressives', including feminist circles. Her comments included: criticizing AIPAC, calling out the state of Israel for its treatment of Palestinians (and rightly so), and calling Barack Obama a "pretty face who got away with murder". That is, until she backtracked -- as she usually does, which shouldn't be surprising -- and proclaimed herself to be an " Obama fan ". More recently, however, she made the following Tweet : Some anti-imperialist critics say that she's a Muslim Brotherhood-controlled opposition or spokesperson, which would not be too farfetched. Here, she is perpetuating the lies used to justify the United States' dirty war on Syria; namely, that the foreign-shipped, head-chopping "mo...

"Let us take the profit, the private economic profit, out of medicine, and purify our profession of rapacious individualism... Let us say to the people not 'How much have you got?' but 'How best can we serve you?'"  — Norman Bethune Doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel thrive better in public universal health care systems because they are not strapped for time, and because they don't inherently want to operate by doing what's simplest for them, by taking shortcuts, and by constantly living in fear of facing lawsuits. Where are they pushed into operating in such a way that is anti-human and goes against ethics in medicine? In privatized health care systems, bastions of Neoliberalism, if ever, such as those seen in the United States. Profit-driven health care does not come with the right to privacy, dignity, and reasonable bodily autonomy, always lacking sufficient funding in providing a variety of options for patients. In public unive...

Transgenders are officially banned from serving in the U.S. military. This is a good thing for the anti-imperialist cause because the less recruitment the U.S. military has, the better it is for the rest of the world, especially for the victims of imperialism. Having said that, the ban should also be extended to the following: women, black people, brown people, gays, disabled persons, heterosexuals, whites... or rather, everyone . Of course, not everyone is celebrating this small, tiny victory. Unsurprisingly, liberal 'social justice warrior' groups such as the organizers of the Women's March on Washington took to Twitter to vent about how " devastating " the news was: Nothing says peak identity politics or peak Brzezinski school of thought like placing more energy and value into the frivolousness of "equal representation". Obviously, that is to be expected from liberals. But, once again, the self-identified "radical" leftists in ...

What is identity politics? To summarize: Identity politics is the anti-scientific idea that "the personal is political." It overemphasizes individual personal experience and separates the root or systemic causes of societal problems from material conditions and the wider class dynamics and economic relations, as it reduces or limits them to psychological phenomena. The most prominent if not overstated subjects are cultural and gender issues. Often, identity politics is fueled by emotionalism, prioritizing self-empowerment rather than class struggle and organizing effectively. And we see several self-styled Western "progressives" indulging in their marginalization, seeing their small group numbers as indicators of how "special they are," while creating a straw man that "asserts that the straight white male is at the apex of the privilege pyramid, responsible for the oppression of all other groups. His original sin condemns him to everlasting ...

Along with Nicaragua, the DPRK, and Jamahiriya Libya, one of the most unfairly maligned countries within Western 'left' circles in recent memory is Syria. Ranging from those who hail the U.S.-backed, foreign  jihadist terrorists as "moderate rebels"  -- to those celebrating the equally-reactionary and -sectarian YPG militias (also backed by the U.S.) in balkanizing and ethnically cleansing northeastern Syria in the hopes that they will fulfill the Anarchist wet dream of "beautiful utopian goals of democratic confederalism" -- it seems that Syria has indeed become a blank canvas upon which the Western left can project their fantasies. It is the new " Terra Nullius ," as author Maximilian Forte ( Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO's War on Libya and Africa ) describes. While sections of the Western left continue to make themselves useful idiots for U.S. imperialism, the legitimate Syrian government and the Syrian people inside of Syria are not ...