​It’s not controversial to make the observation that American global hegemony is tottering, or at least in a serious crisis. But it is a dangerous illusion to make such a judgment too soon. In addition to its overwhelming military arsenal, the American Empire has another asset- its overwhelming cultural hegemony. Hollywood. Silicon Valley. Google. Facebook. Netflix. The force of cultural power is so great that tens of millions of people all over the world, even people whose countries have been devastated by US bombs and military coups, are hypnotized. Many will hand over their sovereignty, their culture, their history, their dignity to be part of the consumerist amusement park that’s being offered to them on their TV and iPhone screens. This power cannot be underestimated.
 
What the scholar Catherine Liu describes as “virtue hoarding”- the practice of the modern American professional managerial class to loudly broadcast its enlightened views on race, gender, and sexuality to justify its privileges over the ‘backward’ lower classes is something that the American Empire is planning to do on a large scale over the entire globe. This means that the United States will justify the right to dominate the world because it is morally superior due to its ‘progressive’ cultural liberalism. The Woke Man/Woman’s Burden.
 
Woke identity politics is the latest legitimizing ideology of the East Coast, WASP establishment of the Ivy Leagues, which enjoys an intertwined, incestuous relationship with the national security state. It has a distinctly Calvinist morality at its center, which presupposes sin (‘privilege’’/’white supremacy’) as the natural state of humanity, unless proven otherwise. Given that prejudice concerns our most intimate and private thoughts and feelings, it is close to impossible to prove one's innocence. For all the talk of ‘systemic racism’ and other ‘systems’, it is a worldview that is concerned with cleansing the individual and controlling social behavior.
 
In 2020, what has been called the Great Awokening needs to be re considered in a new light. It was not a typical protest movement. Viewed in a different lens, it can be argued that the United States underwent perhaps the first internal ‘color revolution’ in its history. The playbook one has seen in Kyrgyzstan, in Lebanon, in Ukraine, in Venezuela, in Bolivia, and in Kazakhstan recently played out on America’s own streets. Color revolutions are not merely manufactured wholesale by the CIA or Western NGO’s out of whole cloth. Instead, such entities embed themselves into society, and when a crisis emerges from that society's own internal contradictions, these organizations activate and steer the unrest in the direction US dominated corporate interests wish them to go. Organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy abroad, and the Ford Foundation at home, carry out parallel functions. Thus, regime change can be accomplished with a great deal of deniability.
 
This is what happened in the United States in the summer of 2020. Culturally liberal capital, especially the Big Tech oligarchs of Amazon, Twitter and Microsoft, immediately lined up behind the (originally spontaneous) mass street protests around George Floyd’s killing and poured tens of millions of dollars into Black Lives Matter. The purpose was twofold: reap a massive public relations coup by being seen on the ‘right side’ of a progressive cause, but also to use the protesters as foot soldiers to counteract Trump’s popular right-wing grassroots movement and drive Trump out of office. Trump represented the old way of doing Empire- overt right-wing nationalism, undisguised contempt for weaker nations, politically incorrect, xenophobic rhetoric. His crude bigotry was embarrassing to the professional managers of American Empire and threatened to undo decades of carefully cultivated US soft power. The suave sophisticates in Silicon Valley, in the drawing rooms of Langley, Virginia, and on Wall Street needed to remedy this.
 
A chaotic, undisciplined street movement, lacking strong leadership or a clear direction, quickly became molded by private capital in its own image. The fatuous conceit that there can be ‘leaderless’ movements is belied by the fact that such directionless movements always wind up making cosmetic symbolic changes or become football in intra elite struggles. Thus, the Great Awokening was a ‘revolution’ of sorts, but not of a BIPOC underclass. It was instead a power grab by culturally liberal professionals doing the bidding of finance capital/Silicon Valley, against nativist lower-level elites.
 
Biden’s coming to office inaugurated not just a new administration, but a new way of doing Empire. The CIA came out with a slick new recruiting video promoting its inclusivity of LGBT and saying that its mission was now ‘Intersectional’. Coups would now be about deconstructing white supremacy and heteropatriarchy.
 
This was reflected in one of the Biden administration’s more successful regime operations in Ecuador in Feb. 2021, where the socialist candidate there was successfully sabotaged by a spoiler candidate claiming to be pro-environment and pro indigenous, while being covertly backed by oil corporations and Wall Street hedge funds.
 
John Gray in the New Statesman describes this phenomenon thus bluntly: “Certain American thought has always tended to a certain solipsism, a trait that has become more prominent in recent times. If Fukuyama and his neoconservative allies believed the world was yearning to be remade on an imaginary American model, the woke movement believes ‘whiteness’ accounts for all the evils of modern societies”. In other words, Woke-ism is the new neo-conservatism.
 
Facing a rising China and a resurgent Russia, the American ruling class needs a moralizing crusade to motivate its counter offensive against its enemies, both at home and abroad. Under the banners of Black Lives Matter, multi-colored Pride flags and trumpets announcing the correct gender pronouns, the guns of the American Empire will spread the creed of Woke Empire.
 
China must be opposed because it is oppressing Muslims. Cuba must have regime change because it is oppressing black people. Belarus’s government must fall because it is anti trans. Putin must be confronted because he is a homophobe. All of these are positions that the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vox, and countless other outlets have advanced at some point or another to advance the case for attacks against ‘America’s enemies’. The West’s Eastern enemies are barbarians who must be subjugated, because they are not enlightened by the standards of American liberalism. In foreign and domestic politics alike, the grievances real and imagined of minorities are spotlighted, then weaponized as a battering ram against entire populations and entire nations which challenge the Anglo-Saxon imperialist global order.
 
Many on the left may acknowledge this cynical weaponization of calls for racial and gender justice on some level, but insist that it is a “co-option’ of innately noble concepts such as intersectionality and Critical Race Theory. This is, frankly, a way that people on the left can sidestep some hard questions- what about the ideology makes it so easy to ‘co-opt’ in the first place? Were these ideas actually ever revolutionary to begin with? In what material way has such discourse actually challenged power and privilege, beyond shallow rhetoric? Neither intersectionality theory nor Critical Race Theory came from working class movements. Not the Black Panthers, the Young Lords or the Young Patriots ever used these words or used them to dictate their praxis.
 
Neither did the Communist Party of the 1930’s or the IWW of the 1910’s. They spoke of solidarity, internationalism, pragmatic alliances of workers and the oppressed, concepts and practices which have been around for centuries.
 
 
‘Intersectionality’ is a different creature. Concepts like it arose entirely in the Ivy Leagues academia and reflect a distinctly upper middle-class morality. The formulation of these theories was in the 1980’s, as a reaction (and a capitulation) to the Reaganite counterrevolution which smashed the labor movement. Contrary to the claims of right-wing conspiracy theorists and left wingers alike, its links to actual Marxism are tenuous and in most cases nonexistent.
 
 Kimberle Crenshaw, the dean of ‘intersectional’ theory, was always a liberal and never claimed to be a socialist of any sort. She was groomed for her position in academia by the Quill and Dagger Society at Cornell, an elite secret society heavily tied to the CIA (Paul Wolfowitz was one of its more prominent members). From 1913 and 1988 a member of this society was entering Congress every year. The cocoon of the heart of the Eastern establishment nurtured and rewarded the careers of these supposedly ‘radical’ theorists.
 
Why would the intelligence community and the corporate world be so comfortable with such theories? Because it tears the very heart out of any sort of egalitarian left from within. Intersectionality removes the centrality of class. Class struggle, and fights on the terrain of economic relations, are replaced with endless moralistic, individualistic struggle along cultural lines. Past revolutionaries always opposed racism and bigotry in all its forms of course, but it was always a component of an overall project for a socialist society. Without that overarching project it becomes a bourgeois philanthropic and evangelical enterprise, akin to the moral uplift projects of the Victorian British elite.
 
Like the war on terrorism, by waging wars on abstractions such as ‘racism’ and ‘patriarchy’, it’s a struggle that can never be won. And thus, is immensely profitable, for both the individuals who make careers off such a war and for institutions with a vested interest in diverting popular frustration and anger toward any struggle but class struggle. In the Great Awokening, we saw the rise of the new priesthood of this religion Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DeAngelo, and others. Kendi is directly on the payroll of the likes of (ex) Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who gave Kendi a 10 million dollar donation to set up an indoctrination temple in Boston University.
 
This new religion is necessary because the old ways of managing the current American/Western order is falling apart at the seams. 40 years of hollowing out of the social state by neoliberalism has all come to a head in COVID, as the wealthiest society in human history allows a million of its people to succumb to a pandemic due to a lack of infrastructure to deal with a public health crisis. The much-vaunted middle class has collapsed in a heap. After generations of retreat and subservience, organized labor is fighting back finally, often over the protests of its own sellout union tops. Hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike in the United States in 2020 and 2021, the greatest strike wave in close to 50 years. Workers of all races, ethnicities, and sexes have no choice but to fight for safe workplaces, decent protective gear, rent control, universal healthcare, and decent wages.
 
In the New Gilded Age, the elite has no butter to give the masses. It has only austerity, repression, surveillance, and going along with that, a morality police staffed by its professional managerial elite.
 
We are already seeing woke ideology play out in the realm of workplace relations. ‘Racial sensitivity training sessions’ are being utilized by corporate management to spy on workers, sabotage union organizing drives, and provide a convenient pretext for the arbitrary firing of employees. There is an entire professional layer of the capitalist management structure (multibillion dollar industry) which not only makes its living off of ‘anti racism’ but which has no material incentive to actually solve the problem, and even has an interest in stoking the flames of division.
 
The crusaders of woke Empire are off to subjugate two frontiers- the ‘problematic’ working masses who are outside the Eastern establishment/Silicon Valley bubbles within the United States, and the even more problematic unwoke billions in Eurasia and Latin America who insist on holding values not compatible with 21st century cosmopolitan liberalism.
 
It is notable that in nearly every country where the American Empire is trying to destroy a socialist, nationalist or anti-imperialist project- whether in Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Belarus, Russia, China, or Iran- the allies of neoliberal imperialism come from the cosmopolitan urban centers where Westernized upper middle classes reside, while the backbone of anti-imperialist resistance comes from the soil of the countryside- the global deplorables.
 
In old fashioned colonialism, doctrines of the biological superiority of the white race served an important ideological role. Yet capitalism and imperialism has mutated ideologically, like a virus. It is high time to recognize that ‘anti racism’ and advocacy of racial/gender equality can be just as much of an effective reigning ideology for the Empire as its opposite. It is time to acknowledge that language so long cherished by the left is now a cudgel against working people at home and abroad. Evil has often come disguised as good.

​In our culture, the language of “survival” is ubiquitous. From climate change and nuclear war to the liberatory struggles of oppressed peoples and the COVID-19 pandemic, the refrain from the discourse is how to survive, rather than thrive, in our current conditions. As Andrew Keshner wrote for MarketWatch in January of 2021, 38% of Americans see themselves in “survival mode,” or “focus[ing] on the day-to-day” rather than any planning for the long-term. This is not without reason. As an increasingly limited political and economic atmosphere provides little to no real avenues of change, people turn into themselves and seek only to withstand the worst of our system. There’s little space for personal or social betterment.
           
How did we get into this mess, and how do we get out? Interestingly, prescient answers to these questions were provided nearly four decades ago by one of America’s most astute historians and cultural critics: the late Christopher Lasch. The former Watson Professor of History at the University of Rochester, Lasch is best remembered for his path-breaking book, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979). In this work, Lasch correctly diagnoses the issue of American life— that the “cultural turn” in American social existence, with its accompanying abandonment of material politics and increasing role for technocracy, has created a generation of narcissists with little to no regard for any overarching political paradigm beyond self expression.

Unfortunately, Lasch has been perennially misunderstood. The narcissism he describes in his works is less akin to the modern colloquial sense in which we apply it— someone who is self-obsessed and sociopathic— but closer to psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s original use of the term. Narcissism, to Freud (and Lasch), represents someone who cannot differentiate themselves from the rest of the world, and therefore cannot identify with anything outside of themselves. Any attempt to find meaning in actions that exist to improve the social life of others or the world that we inhabit falls on deaf ears, and politics becomes more and more an exercise in personal branding and self aggrandizement. As such, Lasch calls on us not to abandon our sense of self, but rather to abandon a selfhood that negates our sense of community, sociality, and moral purpose. Additionally, due to his emphasis on the aforementioned values, Lasch has been misread as a cultural conservative who rejected the radical liberation movements of the 1960s. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, Lasch was a socialist and Marxist whose critique of modern liberalism’s failings called for a more radical, democratic politics.

To clear up these misunderstandings, Lasch wrote a sequel to The Culture of Narcissism that expands and clarifies his ideas. This book, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (1984), anticipated our culture of survival by decades, meticulously laying out how and why our culture has devolved the way it has. When survival is the only watchword of our lives, it becomes increasingly difficult to think of ourselves as agents of social transformation. As Lasch wrote in the preface, “under siege, the self contracts to a defensive core, armed against adversity.” This “defensive core” is the basis for narcissism, which he defined as “seek[ing] both self-sufficiency and self-annihilation: opposite aspects of the same archaic experience of oneness with the world.” Narcissism, to Lasch, was a poor replacement for a real experience of selfhood. “Selfhood is the painful awareness,” he wrote, “of the tension between our unlimited aspirations and our limited understanding, between our original intimations of immortality and our fallen state, between oneness and separation.” A meaningful and positive understanding of the self, both individually and socially, resides in a dialectical relationship between our bounded material existence and our unbounded subjective experience.

Our collective reverse transfiguration of selfhood into a monstrous narcissism stems from, according to Lasch, the influence of mass culture. However, he was quick to point out that this narcissism was not simply an egoism brought about by an outsized consumer market. The markets themselves, echoing Marx’s notion of “commodity fetishism,” mold consumers into “see[ing] the world as a mirror, more particularly as a projection of one’s own fears and desires.” Instead of this consumer mirroring emboldening us as individuals, it makes us “weak and dependent.” In this way, our everyday experiences with consumer goods, from toothpaste to televisions, negate our sense of positive selfhood, of acknowledging our relationship to others and the world. It also stunts political aspirations, as politicians and public policy become increasingly a consumer choice and not a vehicle for transformational change. Lasch believed that this arrangement “make choice the test of moral and political freedom and then reduce[s] it to nonsense.” In a very real sense, Lasch anticipated the “culture wars” of the last forty years, which boil political actors down to commodified “selves” that reflect the consumer choices of a particular cultural milieu, thus reinforcing the entrenched economic and political interests of the ruling class.

Alongside the consumer mentality is the survivalist ethic, one rooted in what Lasch called the “trivialization of crisis.” In his time, the United States and much of the developing world was facing a myriad of crises, mostly brought on by the breakdown of the post-WWII economic order. The rise of inflation, fuel shortages, and economic stagnation plagued the populace— underscoring how crisis pervaded every aspect of life. The environmental and nuclear disarmament movements also used the language of permanent crisis to articulate the importance of survival, above all else. Yet, as Lasch pithily recognized, the emphasis on the centrality of survival trivializes crisis itself, and as such provides most people with little incentive to join a cause. If survival is the only thing that matters, then you really can’t motivate people to care, or worse, they become completely insular and reactionary. As Lasch wrote, “those who base the case for conservation and peace on survival not only appeal to a debased system of values, they defeat their own purpose.” Our movements to fight climate change and establish peace, among many others, must articulate a vision beyond mere survival and cultivate a positive, optimistic outlook of the future. Only then will it become a movement with real lasting power.

Another way in which our culture trivializes crisis and survival, in Lasch’s estimation, was the way we talk about the Holocaust. He was increasingly concerned with how mass media culture and even scientific discourse analyzed the horrific event, finding “lessons” from survivors on how to cope with common adversities. As he wrote:

This exploitation of the ‘Holocaust’ can be charted in the growing preoccupation with survival strategies, in the recklessness with which commentators began to generalize from the concentration camps to normal everyday life, and in their increasing eagerness to see the camps as a metaphor for modern society.
 
Instead of seeing the Holocaust as what it was, an event of extreme barbarism and inhumanity that shaped those who endured it, it is seen merely as another example of how to overcome challenges in one’s life. In attempting to paint society as a concentration camp, Lasch argued, these modern analysts of the Holocaust undermine the historical realities of the era while simultaneously belittling the real trauma and pain that survivors and those killed faced. “When Auschwitz became a social myth, a metaphor for modern life” he noted, “people lost sight of the only lesson it could possibly offer: that it offers, in itself, no lessons.” What he’s getting at here is that we debase the legacy of the Holocaust by turning it into a one more lens to understand the struggles of our everyday existence, rather than as a century-defining crime that often blunts analysis by its cruelty, sadism, and inhumanity.
           
Lasch was also critical of the emerging “New Age” movement of his time, a spirituality movement that he believed reinforced narcissism. Traditional religions, in his estimation, “have always emphasized the obstacles to salvation,” while “modern cults . . . promise immediate relief from the burden of selfhood.” A healthy selfhood seeks to “reconcile the ego and its environment”; the New Age movement, by contrast, “den[ies] the very distinction between them,” and thus cements in a person a stultifying narcissism. While it is certainly true that modern manifestations of traditional religions can have narcissistic effects, specifically the American evangelical movement and its obsession with riches and self-fulfillment, Lasch was nonetheless on to something here. New Age beliefs, from Rhonda Byre’s The Secret to Tony Robbins’ Awaken the Giant Within, reject social understandings of self-transformation and embrace an all-too-pervasive cult of the self. This limits our capacity for empathy, companionship, and collective action. It is no wonder that in our age of Neoliberalism, with its own cult of individualism, finds a complement in these types of beliefs.

​In homing back in on the nature of narcissism, Lasch laid out a perfect illustration of what he’s trying to articulate in his work. He retells the myth of Narcissus, who drowns himself trying to connect to his own reflection— a visage he doesn’t even recognize as a reflection. As Lasch so perfectly noted, “the point of the story is not that Narcissus falls in love with himself, but, since he fails to recognize his own reflection, that he lacks any conception of the difference between himself and his surroundings.” This is the crux of the matter; narcissism isn’t just a cheap formulation of “self obsession,” but a person’s total inability to distinguish between themselves and the world. As such, they fail to grasp how others live, societies function, and even a healthy conceptualization of inner life. This is what the hyper-atomized, consumerist culture we live in does to us. It destroys our conception of selfhood and replaces it with a reflection that, much like Narcissus, will undermine our very ability to live well and fight for others. In other words, Neoliberal capitalism made narcissists of us all.

​This has profound implications for our politics. Lasch outlined in the last two chapters of The Minimal Self how these changes reorient our political situation into three major groups: the “Party of the Superego,” the “Party of the Ego,” and the most challenging to describe, the “Party of Narcissus.”

The Party of the Superego most deftly describes the emerging neoconversative movement, who to Lasch were “former liberals dismayed by the moral anarchy of the sixties and seventies and newly respectful of the values of order and discipline.” Moral regulation is of paramount importance to this group, seeing it as a panacea to all of our political and cultural woes. As Lasch pointed out, they stand “for a morality so deeply internalized, based on respect for the commanding moral presence of parents, teachers, preachers, and magistrates, that it no longer depends on the fear of punishments or hope of rewards.”However, this outlook “overestimates the superego” for Lasch, who rightly acknowledged that fear is a powerful motivator of moral actions. In its “condemnation of the ego,” the rational component of our psyches, the Party of the Superego “breeds a spirit of sullen resentment and insubordination.” The Party of the Superego fails to provide the material and social conditions for moral conduct to take place, which would inspire in people “confidence, respect, and admiration.” In the void of material needs, the Party of the Superego forces moral regulation through fear. If there is any indication that this is true, review how conservatism these days asks so much of the people it seeks to govern without actually addressing people’s actual needs, like housing, healthcare, and higher wages. This formula for social change will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

However, modern liberalism, what Lasch calls the Party of the Ego, isn’t that much better. It takes the opposite approach, foregrounding human reason and science and its solutions to political quandaries. Instead of improving our politics through moral regulation, it seeks what Lasch referred to as the “therapeutic approach,” using developments in psychology as a means to ameliorate human suffering and social unrest. Similar to the Party of the Superego, the Party of the Ego overestimates the efficacy of this method, thereby turning our politics away from democratic participation to technocratic domination. “The therapeutic morality associated with twentieth century liberalism,” Lasch contended, “destroys the idea of moral responsibility, in which it originates, and that it culminates, moreover, in the monopolization of knowledge and power by experts.” It fetishizes the sciences, turning them away from the application of human reason to solve our problems and understanding the world into a cult of expertise that undermines the democratic process. This is also true in our time; liberal politicians and policy makers hail “we believe in science” as a cultural shibboleth while simultaneously supporting harmful policies that go against current scientific knowledge, like approving new oil drilling permits as climate change ravages the planet or providing a few measly COVID-19 tests as the illness rips through the populace. The Party of the Ego really isn’t all that interested in the scientific process— it only seeks to use science’s cultural cachet to influence voters. But like with the Party of the Superego, the Party of the Ego’s contradictions doom its program.

Finally, we get to the Party of Narcissus, the supposed third option that emerged out of political malaise of the aforementioned two camps. This term most exemplifies the “New Left,” a loose ideological consortium of socialists, anarchists, and other left-wing political actors that emerged during the 1960s who embraced the politics of the personal and minimized the importance of class struggle. This group either implicitly or explicitly abandoned the “Old Left’s” commitment to Marxism in exchange for a politics rooted in personal experience. Lasch was mixed on this group's political potential, noting its strengths of democratic participation, critique of power, and distrust of organizations while acknowledging the weaknesses of embracing an all-encompassing politics of cultural revolution. Specifically, Lasch was concerned about its tendency to overstate the case against industrial technology and the self, noting that a transformational politics “rest[s] on a respect for nature, not on a mystical adoration of nature. It has to rest on a firm conception of selfhood, not on the belief that the ‘separate self is an illusion’.” Limiting one’s political horizon to the manifestations of feelings or a retreat from science and material analysis will only be co-opted by the existing power structure. If you need any indication this is true, think of how mainstream political discourse is almost exclusively cultural, with liberals and conservatives defending their hyper-personalized, commodified political identities while ignoring material issues of poverty, wage stagnation, homelessness, hunger, and health care.

So, if all three of these paradigms are faulty, what should be our path forward? In this respect, Lasch was much better at explaining our problems than our solutions. He offered a return to “practical reason,” or “phronesis,” a concept associated with Aristotle that “describes the development of character, moral perfection of life, and the virtues specific to various forms of activity.” Modern politics’ failures, in Lasch’s estimation, stemmed from the elevation of “instrumental reason,” a concept usually associated with the Enlightenment that sees the development of science and technology as goods in and of themselves, divorced from any ancillary moral implications. A superb cultural example of this dilemma comes from Dr. Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum) in the classic film, Jurassic Park. In discussing the implications of bringing dinosaurs back from extinction with the park’s founder, Dr. John Hammond (played by Sir Richard Attenborough), Dr. Malcolm says “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” In thinking only of scientific ends, the park’s designers and scientists unleashed a biotechnological horror on humanity. When we divorce moral considerations from our technological societies, we will create a wasteland of consumer-driven narcissism that feeds on the very immorality it creates.

Instead of mere instrumental reason, Lasch advocated for a politics where “the choice of means has to be governed by their conformity to standards of excellence designed to extend human capacities for self-understanding and self-mastery.” In other words, organizing society with deliberate moral aims at the outset. This can be achieved only when we acknowledge a healthy understanding of the self, which is rooted in “the critical awareness of man’s divided nature. Selfhood expresses itself in the form of a guilty conscience, the painful awareness of the gulf between human aspirations and human limitations.” Human beings are a product of material conditions, and we ignore these conditions at our peril. Lasch believed, despite its own shortcomings, a blending of moral purpose, technological development, and a communitarian spirit is the only path that might work.

​There are certainly limitations to this approach. Lasch lauded the virtues of the “Judeo-Christian” ethic of individualism but doesn’t interrogate the problematic features of its application, specifically imperialism, colonialism, and misogyny. He also ignored the politics of class struggle, something that all successful revolutions of the working class place at the forefront of their movements. Nevertheless, Christopher Lasch’s The Minimal Self is an important, if overlooked, work in the canon of his thought; it articulated more directly his concerns and offered a clearer alternative than his more celebrated work. His crusade to stem the tide of narcissism and politics as cultural affect is something to be celebrated, for he anticipated so much of what came to pass. Our age is also one of crisis and survival, and if we seek to get beyond its confines, Lasch’s ideas represent part of the blueprint to change our collective future.

​Millions have proudly bared their shoulders to receive the Cuban vaccine "Abdala," but few know that this was the name given by Cuba’s national hero, José Martí, in his dramatic poem of the same name, to a young black African who fought and died for the independence of his country, Nubia, invaded by colonialists.

Abdala is the first play written by Martí when he had not yet reached 16 years of age. It is a testament to the love for his homeland of a young man from Nubia, a Sudanese region south of Egypt, a poem published in the context of the beginning of Cuba’s first war against Spain.

In its eight scenes, the young Martí outlines his patriotic ideals and offers a preview of his own life. In the initial part of the drama, a senator comments to Abdala that a conqueror is threatening to occupy Nubian territory, and upon hearing the news the young man responds firmly:

“Well, tell the tyrant that in Nubia / There is one hero for each of his twenty spears... “
The third act of the play features Abdala's meeting with warriors going out to confront the aggressors, when he says:

“To war, brave men! From the tyrant / Let the blood flow, and to his impudent enterprise / Let our stout breasts serve as walls, / And let their blood fire our audacity!”
The fourth and fifth scenes are very moving, as they reflect his mother's fear for her son, as she attempts to dissuade him from going to war, but Abdala tells her that he cannot be detained and is going to the countryside to defend his homeland. In this part of the play, Martí conveys in Abdala's voice his concept of homeland, which is well known and clearly evident in his life’s work:

“Love, mother, for the Homeland / Is not ridiculous love for the land, / Nor for the grass where our plants tread; / It is invincible hatred for those who oppress it, / Eternal wrath for those who attack it…”

Anticipating what would be his own death in combat, Martí concludes his dramatic poem as Abdala lies dying but happy, content that the enemy had been defeated.

Like the young Abdala, created in his work when he was only an adolescent, Martí dedicated his life to his people’s cause and was present where the battles were fought, facing the death he had foreseen.
Cuba’s national hero lived his life according to the precept he raised in New York City’s Hardman Hall, on October 10, 1890, when he insisted: "The true man does not look toward the side where one lives better, but toward the side where duty lies; this is the true man."
​
And this is Abdala, in the vaccine we carry inside, with the same patriotic pride with which Martí conceived the young African hero.

Is social, economic, and political history repeating itself? Robert D. Putnam, best known for his 2000 book Bowling Alone, and his co-author argue here that the contemporary U.S. has some remarkable parallels with the “Gilded Age” of the late 1800s. The upswing in the title refers to the positive strides made in the U.S. society, economy, and polity between the Gilded Age and the 1960s. Can we through deliberate action recreate some of those strides?

The strength of The Upswing is its marshalling of quantitative and qualitative data covering the last 125 years or so. The authors focus on four indicators: economic equality, public cooperation, cohesion of social life, and altruism in cultural values. Both now and in the late 1800s, there was more economic inequality, less public cooperation, less cohesion in social life, and less altruism in cultural values.
​
The authors devote a chapter to each of these dimensions, with clear indicators of each area graphed to show an upside-down “U.” For example, one measure of inequality takes the average total tax rate on the top 1% and subtracts the average total tax rate on the bottom half of the population. When illustrated, the upside-down “U” goes from a low of around 20% in 1910, to a high of 70% in 1960, and back to a low of 25% today. Other measures echo the same shape: gains and losses in minimum wages, regulation of financial markets, and union density. Even life expectancy, once seen as an inevitable upward slope, has begun to descend because of what economists call “deaths of despair” — fatalities due to opioid overdose, suicide, or alcohol abuse.

Public cooperation is a third component explored in a chapter entitled “Politics: From Tribalism to Comity and Back Again.” One measure inevitably is the partisan conflict that is so strong today. The authors argue that partisan loyalty was the weakest in the period around the second world war. Since then, one’s partisan affiliation has devolved into tribalism, as measured by, among other indicators, declines in friendships and marriages across party lines.

Fourth, in turning attention to cultural values over time, Putnam and Garrett contrast individualism and “communitarianism,” a term in sociology that refers to people putting their communities before themselves. Here the authors draw on quantitative data from “Ngrams,” which measure the incidence of given words per million words stored in Google Books. For example, the popularity of “survival of the fittest” reached a peak in 1890, compared to “social gospel,” which peaked in 1960. A graph of the Ngram for the phrase “common man” recreates the ubiquitous bell-shaped curve.

Robert Putnam is a Harvard sociologist, and he is not so naïve not to recognize some major complications to this simple upside-down “U” perspective. Chapters on race and gender explore how these dimensions introduce nuances missing in the “simplified microhistory” of the bell-shaped curve of 125 years of history. Many of the indicators in the race chapter, interracial marriage rates and Black Americans in U.S. Congress for example, trace steady upward trends instead of the familiar upside-down “U.” Furthermore, the text is about “trends and narratives, not certifiable causes.”

While their work on social change doesn’t benefit from a consciously historical materialist viewpoint, Putnam works in a discipline deeply influenced by Karl Marx, and he recognizes the ways that technological advances and changes in the economy reverberate throughout the other sectors of society.

The last chapter zeroes in on the work of several key movers and shakers of the Progressive Era who helped shape the upswing of the early 1900s: Ida B. Wells, Frances Perkins, and Walter Lippman among them. The authors find hope for progressive change in the grassroots organizations, especially of young people. While we might prefer an analysis that recognizes more clearly the concerted action of classes in shaping culture, politics, and social life, Putnam and Garrett’s book is a thorough and thoughtful analysis of patterns in a century-long arc of U.S. history.

Caracas, January 22, 2022 (OrinocoTribune.com)—Gabriel Boric, president-elect of Chile, considers that the leftist governments headed by President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua “have failed.” According to him, the main indication of the Venezuelan government’s failure is “the six million Venezuelans in diaspora;” however, he failed to mention that many in the Venezuelan “diaspora” in South America were encouraged to migrate—with false promises—by right-wing presidents in the region, including the outgoing President of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, and others were forced to leave their country due to the economic crisis caused by the illegal sanctions imposed by the US and European countries.

Boric reiterated his contempt for Venezuela and Nicaragua in an interview with BBC Mundo published this Friday, January 21, in which he was asked if he identified with any of the “leftist rulers” of the region. He responded that he understood that the question “was closely related to Venezuela and Nicaragua.” In the case of Nicaragua, he vaguely commented that he could not “find anything [of worth] there.”
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In contrast, he stressed that it gave him “a lot of hope” to be able to work “side by side with Luis Arce in Bolivia; with Lula if he wins the election in Brazil; the hope of Gustavo Petro if it comes to fruition in Colombia,” because this would make it possible to build “a tremendously interesting axis.”

“How many Chileans would be in the diaspora if Chile was prevented from selling copper?” he questioned. According to the former president of Ecuador, what Boric said about Venezuela, without taking into account the US-led suffocation of the Venezuelan economy, “is like finding a drowned man chained and claiming that he died because he did not know how to swim.”

This Friday Boric also announced his cabinet in a move that many analysts associate with the US Democratic Party style of identity politics, as the fact that 14 out of the 24 new ministers to take office next March will be women has been highlighted, without much attention to the appointment of hardcore pro-market / neoliberal figures in key economy-related ministries.

Moreover, the appointment of Antonia Urrejola as minister for foreign affairs has raised eyebrows among many. Renowned US journalist Benjamin Norton reacted, “Chile’s new government is looking to be more of the same: Millennial socdem President-elect Gabriel Boric selected as his foreign minister a neoliberal imperialist who worked for the US-controlled OAS and supported the right-wing coup attempt in Nicaragua.”

Urrejola had worked tirelessly, as the head of the Interamerican Court of Human Rights (CIDH), with Luis Almagro’s Organization of American States (OAS), in backing the failed “color revolution” launched in 2018 against President Daniel Ortega and the Nicaraguan people. It is also worth remembering that she had been the head of the team of former Secretary General of the OAS, José Miguel Insulza, during whose tenure (2005-2015) the Honduran government headed by Manuel Zelaya was overthrown by the US in 2009, and the year before, there was a failed coup attempt against Evo Morales in Bolivia. In both cases the OAS did nothing to stop the coups, and Urrejola never uttered a word against them. Similarly, she has never taken a stand against the grave human rights violations committed by the government of Iván Duque in Colombia and that of Piñera in her own country; yet she has constantly criticized the government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, branding it a “regime.”

Another not very promising appointment—although expected—was that of the “communist star” Camila Vallejo, who too has made very non-Marxist comments about Chavismo and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. Vallejo was appointed the secretary general of the cabinet, equivalent to government spokesperson.

Journalist Jonathan Cook has a new blog post out on his experience with being throttled into invisibility by Silicon Valley algorithmic suppression that will ring all too familiar for any online content creators who've been sufficiently critical of official western narratives over the last few years.

"My blog posts once attracted tens of thousands of shares," Cook writes. "Then, as the algorithms tightened, it became thousands. Now, as they throttle me further, shares can often be counted in the hundreds. 'Going viral' is a distant memory."

"I won’t be banned," he adds. "I will fade incrementally, like a small star in the night sky – one among millions – gradually eclipsed as its neighbouring suns grow ever bigger and brighter. I will disappear from view so slowly you won’t even notice."
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Cook says this began after the 2016 US election, which was when a major narrative push began for Silicon Valley corporations to eliminate "fake news" from their platforms and soon saw tech executives brought before the US Senate and told that they must "quell information rebellions" and come up with a mission statement expressing their commitment to "prevent the fomenting of discord" online.

Arguably the most significant political moment in the United States since 9/11 and its immediate aftermath was when Democrats and their allied institutions concluded that Donald Trump's election was a failure not of establishment politics but of establishment narrative control. From that point onwards, any online media creator who consistently disputes the narratives promoted by the same news outlets who've lied to us about every war has seen their view counts and new follows slashed.

By mid-2017 independent media outlets were already reporting across ideological lines that algorithm changes from important sources of viewership like Google had suddenly begun hiding their content from people who were searching for the subjects they reported on. 

"In case anyone wants to know how Facebook suppression works - I have 330,000 followers there but they've stopped showing my posts to many people," Redacted Tonight host Lee Camp tweeted in January 2018. "I used to gain 6,000 followers a week. I now gain 500 and FB unsubscribes people without their knowledge - so my total number never increases."

I saw my own shares and view counts rapidly diminish in 2017 as well, and saw my new Facebook page follows suddenly slow to a virtual standstill. It wasn't until I started using mailing lists and giving indie media outlets blanket permission to republish all my content that I was able to grow my audience at all.
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And Silicon Valley did eventually admit that it was in fact actively censoring voices who fall outside the mainstream consensus. In order to disprove the false right-wing narrative that Google only censors rightist voices, the CEO of Google's parent company Alphabet admitted in 2020 to algorithmically throttling World Socialist Website. Last year the CEO of Google-owned YouTube acknowledged that the platform uses algorithms to elevate "authoritative sources" while suppressing "borderline content" not considered authoritative, which apparently even includes just marginally establishment-critical left-of-center voices like Kyle Kulinski. Facebook spokeswoman Lauren Svensson said in 2018 that if the platform's fact-checkers (including the state-funded establishment narrative management firm Atlantic Council) rule that a Facebook user has been posting false news, moderators will "dramatically reduce the distribution of all of their Page-level or domain-level content on Facebook."

People make a big deal any time a controversial famous person gets removed from a major social media platform, and rightly so; we cannot allow such brazen acts of censorship to become normalized. The goal is to normalize internet censorship on every front, and the powerful will push for that normalization to be expanded at every opportunity. Whether you dislike the controversial figure being deplatformed on a given day is entirely irrelevant; it's not about them, it's about expanding and normalizing internet censorship protocols on monopolistic government-tied speech platforms.

But far, far more consequential than overt censorship of individuals is censorship by algorithm. No individual being silenced does as much real-world damage to free expression and free thought as the way ideas and information which aren't authorized by the powerful are being actively hidden from public view, while material which serves the interests of the powerful is the first thing they see in their search results. It ensures that public consciousness remains chained to the establishment narrative matrix. 

It doesn't matter that you have free speech if nobody ever hears you speak. Even in the most overtly totalitarian regimes on earth you can say whatever you want alone in a soundproof room.
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That's the biggest loophole the so-called free democracies of the western world have found in their quest to regulate online speech. By allowing these monopolistic megacorporations to become the sources everyone goes to for information (and even actively helping them along that path as in for example Google's research grants from the CIA and NSA), it's possible to tweak algorithms in such a way that dissident information exists online, but nobody ever sees it.

You've probably noticed this if you've tried to search YouTube for videos which don't align with the official narratives of western governments and media lately. That search function used to work like magic; like it was reading your mind. Now it's almost impossible to find the information you're looking for unless you're trying to find out what the US State Department wants you to think. It's the same with Google searches and Facebook, and because those giant platforms dictate what information gets seen by the general public, that wild information bias toward establishment narratives bleeds into other common areas of interaction like Twitter as well.

The idea is to let most people freely share dissident ideas and information about empire, war, capitalism, authoritarianism and propaganda, but to make it increasingly difficult for them to get their content seen and heard by people, and to make their going viral altogether impossible. To avoid the loud controversies and uncomfortable public scrutiny brought on by acts of overt censorship as much as possible while silently sweeping unauthorized speech behind the curtain. To make noncompliant voices "disappear from view so slowly you won’t even notice," as Cook put it.

The status quo is not working. Our ecosystem is dying, we appear to be rapidly approaching a high risk of direct military confrontation between nuclear-armed nations, and our world is rife with injustice, inequality, oppression and exploitation. None of this is going to change until the public begins awakening to the problems with the current status quo so we can begin organizing a mass-scale push toward healthier systems. And that's never going to happen as long as information is locked down in the way that it is.
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Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. And as more and more people get their information about what's happening in the world from online sources, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation has already become one of the most consequential forms of narrative control.

The war danger in Ukraine is escalating, and once more it is Washington and the NATO military alliance it controls which are raising the stakes in this deadly gamble.

President Joe Biden ratcheted up tensions this weekend with the revelation that he plans to possibly dispatch as many as 50,000 troops—along with tanks, missiles, aircraft, and warships—to NATO military allies in the Baltic states and Eastern Europe.
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The U.S. has also issued marching orders to other NATO members. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the Biden administration’s top propaganda chief on the Ukraine matter, said Sunday that “NATO will continue to be reinforced…if Russia commits renewed acts of aggression.”

​But what are the new supposed threats from Russia that merit kicking the U.S.-led war machine into high gear?

Biden insists Russia could “move in” on its neighbor at any minute but offers no information about anything new when it comes to Russian military developments. It’s been public knowledge for weeks that Russian forces have taken up positions at the country’s western borders, but the government of President Vladimir Putin continues to deny it has any intention of invading Ukraine.

Instead, it points the finger back at NATO, saying the accusations against Russia are a cover for the military alliance’s own provocations—those already underway and those still planned. Dmitry Peskov, spokesperson for the Kremlin, told the media this weekend, “All this is happening not because of what we, Russia, are doing. This is happening because of what NATO and the U.S. are doing.”
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One doesn’t have to be a fan of the authoritarian and oligarchic state run by Putin to see that Russia’s claims have some merit. The current crisis is underpinned by major issues that stretch back over the past 30 years—from the end of the Cold War to the present—and which are receiving little to no attention in the mainstream press.

First is the prolonged instability that has defined Russian-Ukrainian relations since the dismantling of the socialist Soviet Union in 1990-91. For hundreds of years, Russia and Ukraine have been tied together—socially, culturally, politically, and in every other imaginable way. The two Slavic countries even share an origin point in the Kievan Rus state that came into existence in the area around modern Kiev more than a millennium ago. Over centuries, their people intermarried, fought off Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler together, and built an advanced modern industrial economy.

Those connections were severed by the fall of the USSR. In other regions, the destruction of the Soviet Union saw the outbreak of violent ethnic and religious conflicts when communities were suddenly split apart or forced together by nationalist regimes. The war between Armenia and Azerbaijan last year is only the most recent example.
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For Ukraine, the current downward spiral in relations with Russia started in 2014 when a coup by U.S.-and European Union-backed ultra-nationalist and fascist forces overthrew the elected (but undeniably corrupt) government of supposedly pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. The U.S. and its allies claim it was Moscow’s man Yanukovych who forced the turn toward violence and confrontation when his security forces opened fire on protesters in Kiev’s Maidan square in February that year, killing 50 people.

Extensive research from University of Ottawa Professor Ivan Katchanovski is upsetting the narrative pushed by the West and its allied regime in Kiev. Looking at the testimony of over 100 wounded demonstrators, dozens of prosecution witnesses, the examinations of the Ukrainian government’s own forensic and ballistic experts, and hours of videotapes, Katchanovski has concluded that the massacre of the “absolute majority of protesters and police” at the Maidan was perpetrated by “members of the Maidan opposition, specifically it’s far-right element.”

In simpler terms: It was the fascist forces supported by the West, not the Russian-backed Yanukovych, who fired the opening shots in the violence that has since killed more than 13,000 people. The truth about the “sniper’s massacre,” according to Katchanovski, has been repeatedly “misrepresented, omitted, or even covered up by Western governments and…the mainstream media.”

If the very first line in the Western powers’ story about Ukraine is a lie, it becomes prudent to look at everything they’ve said since with a skeptical eye. That includes everything they’re saying now.

For instance, the government of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson—which is on the ropes at home and could fall at any time—claimed on Saturday that Moscow was plotting to install a “pro-Russian” leader in Ukraine. Conveniently, the figure Putin allegedly plans to tap to run a puppet regime is Yevgeniy Murayev—a former MP who opposed the fascist-backed coup of 2014, has long been an ally of Ukrainian trade unions, and is now a leading voice speaking out against the war danger.

Murayev believes the Ukrainian government is selling the country’s future to the U.S., whose weapons makers he said are whipping up the war hysteria to reap whirlwind profits. “The hawks are looking forward to a feast,” he wrote. Biden’s big troop and armaments deployments seem to fit the bill. It’s little wonder then that London and Washington are trying to link Murayev to Putin and derail his anti-war party from gaining public support.
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Like the “sniper’s massacre,” the claims about the planned installation of a pro-Kremlin puppet start to look suspiciously like the Western powers accusing Russia and its friends of exactly the things they themselves have done and are doing.

If the West had truly been interested in creating the conditions for a lasting peace in that moment when the Cold War was ending, it would have dissolved NATO completely. The Soviet-led Warsaw Pact was liquidated, but the U.S. and its allies didn’t respond in kind.

In fact, they barely wasted a minute to prove that Bush’s promise was a lie—not only expanding into former Warsaw Pact countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Romania but actually gobbling up nations that were formerly part of the USSR itself, like Latvia and Lithuania.

With the excuse of being a “defensive” alliance against the Soviet Union gone, NATO was openly refashioned into a direct instrument of U.S. military priorities. NATO helped tear the country of Yugoslavia into pieces, bombarded Afghanistan after Sept. 11th, assisted in the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and assisted in pushing Libya into a civil war.
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Given this history, Russia’s fear of NATO pulling Ukraine into its sphere and creeping directly up to the Russian border is far from absurd. It is little wonder that Putin demands the U.S. and NATO remove all weapons from Ukraine, that a guarantee be issued Ukraine will not join the alliance and the security of all former Soviet nuclear weapons on Ukrainian territory. Any Russian leader—left, right, or center—would ask the same.

The war hawks in the military-industrial complex and their political spokespersons in Congress are of course pushing for further escalation. The threat of war alone has already been enough to bring the cash rolling in for the weapons makers.

Even if Biden is not inclined to listen to the advice of an anti-war outlet like People’s World, he should at least heed the advice of the so-called foreign policy “realists” of establishment think tanks such as the Quincy Institute. Its working group of “former American and British ambassadors and experts on Russia and Ukraine” says an actual Russian invasion of Ukraine is not in the cards, despite the screaming of the media, and that Washington has to issue a “moratorium on further NATO expansion” for at least the next few decades.

Lyle Goldstein, an analyst at the military think tank Defense Priorities, has given the administration similar counsel. U.S. intervention would have “deleterious and even catastrophic consequences,” he argues. Even indirect interference, such as providing more weapons to the Ukrainian government, Goldstein says, would “further cement the ‘New Cold War,’ prolong the war and the killing” and push Russia to look for other ways of protecting itself militarily.

Acknowledging the necessity of halting NATO expansion into Ukraine does not represent a concession to Putin; it is a concession to common sense. Nor does it compromise the self-determination of the Ukrainian people. The truth is that the West compromised on that in 2014 when it helped install a fascist-backed government in Kiev.
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It’s now up to President Biden and his NATO allies to bring us all back from the precipice of war.

2021 was marked, from start to finish, as a year dominated by the pandemic and its attendant dramas, including vaccination, variants, and lockdowns. When the prior year had come to a close, journalists and writers had described 2020 as the “plague year” or the “lost year.” Although 2020 was defined by the onset of the pandemic and over two million deaths attributed to COVID-19, this was nothing compared to the all-encompassing, inescapable pall that COVID cast over the year 2021.

The pandemic has dealt a particularly heavy blow to residents of the world’s greatest imperialist power, where over 880,000 US citizens have perished. The country’s failure to care for the well being of its people — particularly when juxtaposed with the success of China, where about 875,000 fewer deaths have been attributed to the novel coronavirus — laid bare the futility of capitalism and individualism when faced with crisis. The parallels with global climate catastrophe are impossible to ignore.

From January 1, 2021, until the final day of the year, powerful blows reigned down on the global imperial superstructure captained by the US, leading in tow its Western European vassal states and junior partners including Canada, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Colombia, India and the UK.

January 6: If any one event marks the end of the unipolar world led by the US since the fall of the Soviet Union, it is the cringeworthy storming of the US Capitol, incited by Donald Trump and carried out by farcical supporters united by their belief that the US presidential election was a fraud.
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“Trump did more for the liberation of humanity from Western imperialism, because of his crudeness, than any other US leader in history,” commented political analyst Laith Marouf — and that was before the embarrassment of the failed uprising exposed the fragility of the US capitalist regime.

January 19: On his very last day in office, disgraced President Trump labels China’s treatment of Xinjiang’s Uighur community as a “genocide.” The laughable claim is promptly echoed by mainstream/imperialist media. A month later, Canada’s parliament voted to second the motion, cementing its status as fawning minion to the US war machine. These claims were particularly ironic as Canada, like the US, is a nation founded on actual genocide.

January 28: The GameStop scandal went viral and many learned firsthand that capitalism was a giant Ponzi scheme designed to plunder their savings.

March 7: A death blow was dealt to Brazil’s Bolsonaro regime, one of the US’ largest and most compliant vassals, as former President Lula was acquitted of all charges related to the Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash) lawfare scheme which had imprisoned him for 580 days. The failure of the maneuver exposed the similar proceedings against his successor, Dilma Rousseff, as a fraud, and later in the year the White House admitted the nefarious role it played in using paralegal means — also known as lawfare — to overthrow Brazil’s progressive governments and replace them with the neo-fascist Bolsonaro, whose popularity continued to bottom out through the course of the year.
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March 13: The 99% rejoiced as fugitive former Bolivian dictatress Jeanine Áñez was discovered hiding under a bed and arrested by the democratically elected government of Luis Arce, committed to restoring order in Bolivia and serving justice to Áñez’s US-backed coup regime.

April 28: The gigantic paro nacional [national strike] broke out across US client state Colombia. A neoliberal austerity package passed by the Duque regime set off the mobilizations. The package would have seen Colombia bowing to IMF pressure with a swath of proposed “reforms” that increased taxes on the most vulnerable, accelerated privatization of healthcare, increased student tuition fees, and allowed for a 10-year wage freeze. The national strike was met with brutal force, dozens were killed and thousands arrested.
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The immensity of the revolt led to working-class victories including “the withdrawal of the tax package, the sinking of the privatizing health project, the extension of the zero tuition to students of stratum 3, the unanimous international condemnation against the insane wave of police-paramilitary repression of the regime, the forced resignation of the ministers of finance and foreign affairs — representatives of the imperialist bourgeoisie — and a parliamentary trial of the minister of war,” as detailed by the World Federation of Trade Unions.

May 14: Amid the genocidal war on Palestine waged by the apartheid state, Hamas missiles pierced the so-called Iron Dome defense system. The vaunted missile defense system, funded by billions of dollars from the US and the apartheid state, proved to be an overpriced lemon, like so many other US weapons of war, as Gaza rose to the defense of Palestinians in the West Bank, on the other side of their divided nation. The militant solidarity shown by Gaza, and its ensuing sacrifice when civilian dwellings were subsequently levelled by the apartheid state, will be remembered as a turning point in the long journey towards a free Palestine.

May 26: President Bashar al-Assad was re-elected by the Syrian people, receiving 78% of the vote. “Supporters of the president took to the streets in the hundreds of thousands as the results were publicized, celebrating what they saw as a repudiation of violence and a step forward for the beleaguered nation,” wrote Mnar Adley for MintPress News. Celebrations in Damascus put the lie to claims by the empire ruled from DC regarding Assad’s supposed lack of popular support.

May 29: A chilling reminder that Canada was founded on the genocide of the Indigenous inhabitants of the land was unearthed in Kamloops, BC. A mass grave of 215 children, whose deaths were undocumented, was found at an Indigenous children’s concentration camp — euphemistically called “residential school” — after years of denial that such sites existed.

“We hear from residential school survivors who tell you of these things happening, of mass graves existing, and everybody always denies that those stories are true,” said Arlen Dumas, grand chief of Manitoba’s Assembly of Chiefs. “Well, here’s one example… there will be more.”

Sure enough, mass graves continued to be unearthed throughout 2021. The last Canadian “residential school” closed in 1996, and between 6,000 to 50,000 children are estimated to have been murdered in the concentration camps for Indigenous children.

June 6: Pedro Castillo, presidential candidate of Peru’s Marxist Peru Libre party, rose from virtual obscurity to defeat the right-wing candidate Keiko Fujimori, daughter of disgraced former President Alberto Fujimori, convicted in 2008 of crimes against humanity. Castillo named staunch left-wing revolutionary Héctor Béjar as his foreign minister, who re-established diplomatic relations with Venezuela (made official on October 16), bringing an end to the Canada-led “regime”-change operation The Lima Group. Béjar referred to The Lima Group as “the most disastrous thing” Peru had ever done in the field of foreign relations.

June 24: The Bicentennial Congress of the Peoples of the World convened in Caracas, Venezuela, to celebrate the 200-year anniversary of the Battle of Carabobo, the decisive victory by Venezuelan troops, led by Simón Bolívar, over Spanish imperialism. Delegates from 123 countries attended the Congress, lauded as an “anti-imperialist and internationalist space for dialogue with social movements.”
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June 24: Yet another powerful symbol of the crumbling foundations of the empire ruled from DC, a building collapse in Miami, Florida, left 98 people dead. Only four survived the sudden disintegration of the 12-story beachfront condominium, one of the deadliest residential building collapses in modern history. Rescue operations went on for two weeks. With each passing day, monotonous news items covered the rescue operations, effectively delaying the announcement of the death toll until few were paying attention anymore.

June 28: Russia and China announced the renewal of their 20-year long mutual cooperation pact. “The two sides agreed to continue maintaining close high-level exchanges, strengthening vaccine cooperation, expanding bilateral trade, and expanding cooperation in low-carbon energy, digital economy, agriculture and other fields and promote the alignment of the Belt and Road Initiative with the Eurasian Economic Union,” reported Xinhua. The midsummer event was another milestone in the death march of the unipolar world.

July 1: The Communist Party of China celebrated 100 years since its founding. During that span, the CPC has lifted 850,000 people out of extreme poverty, according to the DC-based World Bank.

July 6: Honduras’ highest court found Roberto David Castillo guilty of the 2016 murder of celebrated land defender and activist Berta Cáceres. Castillo was a graduate of the West Point US Military Academy in New York state. COPINH, the organization founded by Cáceres, hailed the verdict as a “people’s victory for justice for Berta; a step towards breaking the pact of impunity.” In addition, COPINH hoped that the conviction would open the door to “bringing the masterminds behind the crime to justice,” members of Honduras’ family of billionaires, the Atalas.

July 6: The dictator Jovenel Moïse, who dissolved parliament and ruled Ayiti (Haiti) by decree beyond the term of his mandate, was assassinated by a team of Colombian paramilitaries contracted by a Florida-based firm. Ayiti had been racked by waves of mass protests and general strikes almost continually since 2018, when Venezuela was forced to suspend the Petrocaribe program due to US economic sanctions on Venezuela’s national petroleum company PDVSA. Petrocaribe had provided cheap fuel to Ayiti in exchange for deferred payment. These deferred funds, earmarked for social programs, were instead pocketed by Moïse’s administration. Demonstrators demanded his resignation and a proper election in which Fanmi Lavalas could fully participate. The Moïse regime was propped up by the de facto ruling cartel, the Core Group including the US, Brazil, and Canada.

August 13: The Mexico Talks, a dialogue between Venezuela’s government and the opposition, began in Mexico City. To its great ire, the US was excluded from the process. Both parties signed a memorandum demanding an end to the economic blockade imposed on Venezuela by the empire ruled from DC.
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August 15: With the US hastening its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban took the capital Kabul and overthrew the US puppet government. Videos filmed at Kabul airport the next day went viral, capturing the hysteria of the fleeing US forces and their supporters. At least five people died in the panic, while about 200,000 Afghans were directly killed by the failed invasion and 20-year long occupation, led by the empire ruled from DC.

September 16: Working in tandem, the resistance forces of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah break the imperial siege on Lebanon, delivering much-needed Iranian fuel. The courageous operation exposed the permeable nature of illegal US and EU “sanctions,” which had triggered shortages, fuel scarcity, inflation, and a deadly economic crisis in Lebanon.

September 16: Thumbing his nose at the empire, Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador invited his Cuban counterpart, Miguel Díaz-Canel, as guest of honor for Mexico’s independence day celebrations. AMLO used the opportunity to reiterate his calls for an end to the 61-year-long US economic blockade of Cuba.

November 7: Daniel Ortega, leader of the Sandinista revolution that defeated the US-backed Somoza dictatorship and overcame the subsequent counter-revolutionary assault of the US-funded and trained Contra paramilitaries, was re-elected as president of Nicaragua. The result came as no surprise because Ortega has presided over a broadening of social programs and a strong Nicaraguan economy since his return to power in 2007. “The Nicaraguan people believe in their government and their electoral system,” wrote electoral monitor Dan Kovalik. “And one of the things they believe in is the government’s right, and indeed duty, to protect the country and its sovereignty from outside intervention, and in particular the incessant intervention by the US, which has been interfering in Nicaragua — often through local quislings — in quite destructive ways for over a century.”

In 2021 the rabid mainstream media assault on Nicaragua’s democracy accused Ortega of jailing his opponents, after a court order prevented Cristiana Chamorro from running due to illegal foreign campaign contributions. Chamorro’s NGO received over $6 million from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) since 2015, more than half of which went to influencing the 2021 elections.

November 15: Heavily publicized in Western media, this day was supposed to see a great popular uprising in Cuba, a supposed resurgence of the protests that had shaken the nation in early July, when Cuba suffered its worst COVID-19 problems.

“The nationwide ‘Marches for Change’ was scheduled for November 15,” wrote Ted Snider. “The Biden administration endorsed the demonstrations. So did Congress: on November 3, the House of Representatives voted 382–40 — and you thought they couldn’t agree on anything — for a resolution declaring ‘strong solidarity’ with ‘courageous Cuban men, women, and youth taking to the streets in cities and towns across the country.’ What the media and the government doesn’t want to tell you is that, once again, it didn’t happen.” The non-event was dubbed #15Nada.

November 21: Venezuela’s violent opposition returned to the political fray for the country’s regional and municipal “mega”-elections. These were carried out in relative peace, without any credible allegations of fraud, by Venezuela’s internationally acclaimed electoral system. The results were a sweeping victory for the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). The PSUV captured 19 of 23 state governorships (including the capital district), and 213 of 325 mayoralties.
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November 29: Perhaps the most inspiring and surprising of the year’s significant electoral victories, in Honduras Xiomara Castro unseated US-backed narco-dictator President Juan Orlando Hernández. Castro is representative of the rising anti-imperialist political forces in Latin America. Her husband, Manuel Zelaya, was overthrown by the Honduran military — with Hillary Clinton’s blessing — in 2009, after he promised to convoke a Constituent Assembly to write a new Constitution, raise the minimum wage, and join the ALBA-TCP regional alliance founded by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez in 2004.

December 9: Nicaragua resumed diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, recognizing the One China principle and the sovereignty of China in Taiwan. Nicaragua thus ceased to consider Taiwan as a country and severed all contact and official relationship with Taipei. This expands the scope of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Latin America and at the same time diminishes US imperial authority in the region.

2021 was marked by a series of embarrassments and defeats for the empire ruled from DC, the decisive end of US hegemony, and the birth of a new multipolar world, which promises to continue asserting itself in the face of informational and military assault throughout 2022 and beyond.

The Detroit protest rebellion of 1967 had the impact of crystallizing or aggravating a capital boycott that had then been developing for 15 or 20 years, a divestment by the bourgeoisie - big capital - something like that economic blockade or embargo on Cuba. This agreement for a capital boycott was not done by law, instead it was private agreements which were most responsible for the disassembly of Detroit as a labor giant. The relationship of business to Detroit as a result is something like the relationship of world capitalism to Haiti since the revolution there a couple of centuries ago.

​With the corporate flight from Detroit, a capital boycott was inflicted on a former concentration point of capital investment, by suburbanization of factories, plant closings, runaway shops to the South, and globalization of production.

There was the bullet and then the ballot. The rebellion, a mass protest or demonstration, guerilla theatre against white supremacist unemployment, poverty and police brutality. Then the 1973 election of Coleman Young as a Black mayor extraordinaire. For these exercises of Black power and really for now being 85 percent majority Black population, Detroit is still under economic blockade punishment by the powers that be.
 
"The news magazines called Detroit a model city. They marveled at its
strong chin and gushed over the heroic benevolence of Mayor Cavanagh,
who had become the gallant knight of the War on Poverty by spearing
forty-two million federal dollars for the city's poor people. Cavanagh
was widely portrayed as a sort of Great White Sympathizer, and the
fact is, he worked hard at maintaining a symbiotic rapport with Black
leaders. In that spirit, he had established an amicable relationship
that let observers to think of Detroit as being immunized against the
outbreak of inner-city rioting that had torn apart Watts in 1965,
bloodied Chicago and Philadelphia, and in 1967 was sweeping the
country at a rate that would produce 164 incidents, among them major
revolts in Cleveland and Newark." (Young, 170)

The federal government's Kerner Commission report essentially agreed that the "riot" protests in the dozens of majority Negro ghettoes around the country had legitimate gripes. Detroit's 1967 mass spontaneous protests were the culmination of a socioeconomic historical shift which was marked by segregating of residence based on race through white flight to the suburbs especially beginning in the 1950s, escaping the move toward integration represented in open housing law. It was also part of a relative scattering of some main points of industrial production from a concentration in the city of Detroit ( and neighboring Dearborn) to the surrounding suburbs. It was a breaking up of the World War II era Arsenal of Democracy.

In a way, there seems to have been a shifting of the location of basic production from the Midwest to the South, from the U.S. to other countries, in what gets termed post-industrialism, post-Fordism, restructuring. The concentrated proletarian powerhouse was busted up and racially resegregated, on the typical American model: Black vs. white.

​The bourgeoisie cannot really undo what they have done. They are hoisted on their own petard. Detroit is a pariah society in the national media still, as the latest Time article shows. White masses are shy to move back into Detroit; although in 2014, there has been some white popular migration into Detroit.
 
The bourgeoisie will not invest in the people of an African town like this, with so few white people to benefit. They are trying to move more white people in so that they can feel better about investing. They, the bourgeoisie, had to economically blockade us like Cuba, or Haiti have been for decades and scores of decades. Like the great heavyweight boxing champion of the world, Jack Johnson, Detroit is unforgivably Black and Proud.

In November 2020, the Moroccan government ​sent its military to the Guerguerat area, a buffer zone between the territory claimed by the Kingdom of Morocco and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). The Guerguerat border post is at the very southern edge of Western Sahara along the road that goes to Mauritania. The presence of Moroccan troops “in the Buffer Strip in the Guerguerat area” violated the 1991 ceasefire agreed upon by the Moroccan monarchy and the Polisario Front of the Sahrawi. That ceasefire deal was crafted with the assumption that the United Nations would hold a referendum in Western Sahara to decide on its fate; no such referendum has been held, and the region has existed in stasis for three decades now.

In mid-January 2022, the United Nations sent its Personal Envoy for Western Sahara Staffan de Mistura to Morocco, Algeria, and Mauritania to begin a new dialogue “toward a constructive resumption of the political process on Western Sahara.” De Mistura was previously deputed to solve the crises of U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria; none of his missions have ended well and have mostly been lost causes. The UN has appointed five personal envoys for Western Sahara so far—including Mistura--beginning with former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker III, who served from 1997 to 2004. De Mistura, meanwhile, succeeded former German President Horst Köhler, who resigned in 2019. Köhler’s main achievement was to bring the four main parties—Morocco, the Polisario Front, Algeria, and Mauritania—to a first roundtable discussion in Geneva in December 2018: this roundtable process resulted in a few gains, where all participants agreed on “cooperation and regional integration,” but no further progress seems to have been made to resolve the issues in the region since then. When the UN initially put forward De Mistura’s nomination to this post, Morocco had initially resisted his appointment, but under pressure from the West, Morocco finally accepted his appointment in October 2021, with Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita welcoming him to Rabat on January 14. De Mistura also met the Polisario Front representative to the UN in New York on November 6, 2021, before meeting other representatives in Tindouf, Algeria, at Sahrawi refugee camps in January. There is very little expectation that these meetings will result in any productive solution in the region.

​1938 would be the year that would forever change Choi Hong Hi’s life. That was the year Choi gambled away all the money his mother had saved for his schooling. In a fit of panic, Choi smashed an ink bottle over the winner’s head before running off to Japan. The man Choi had nearly killed was a local wrestler who swore that if Choi ever came back to the village, he would tear the five-foot-tall boy “limb from limb.” Four years later, Choi did come back to the village, but not before gathering a small crowd to watch him smash several roof tiles with such speed that the wrestler thought Choi was having a stroke. Choi would later call this martial art Taekwondo, and after rising to become a general in the South Korean army, named himself the founder.
 
What started as a martial art in a tiny peninsula has 70 million practitioners in 203 nations today. It made the careers of famed action stars like Chuck Norris and Jean Claude Van Damme. A year after student-led protests forced the military dictatorship to accept democratic elections, Taekwondo was introduced to the Olympics, the second martial art to do so after Judo. What is less known is that the founder of Taekwondo’s largest federation was an agent for the South Korean secret police or that Choi Hong Hi’s son was once arrested for training North Korean commandos.
 
Decades before Kpop or Squid Game were in the global lexicon, Taekwondo had clawed its way to become South Korea’s main cultural export. Raised by every major historical event that rocked the nation in the past century, including but not limited to: Japanese imperialism, the Korean War, military dictatorships, and even the emergence of anticommunist cults, it had come to be seen by many to symbolize South Korea’s resurrection from a nameless colony into the global powerhouse that Koreans still take deep pride in to this day. 

According to the World Taekwondo headquarters, also known as the Kukkiwon, Taekwondo is rooted in a 1500 year old martial art practiced by the Hwarang, warriors handpicked from the Silla dynasty’s nobility. The problem with that statement is that it's a total lie. The Hwarang were not only not an elite group of soldiers, they were actually young male aristocrats who danced and dressed in women’s clothing. Yi Jong Gu, who wrote many of the textbooks that fabricated this myth, confessed just as much in an interview;
 
We didn’t have anything else to offer. In the early days of trying to introduce taekwondo abroad, if we said it was an ancient, traditional Korean martial art, we gained some bragging rights, plus this played well abroad. However, even if there are similarities, this just isn’t the truth.
 
Alex Gillis’s extraordinary 1998 book “A Killing Art” digs deep into how Taekwando’s history was rewritten to fit the nationalist zeitgeist which characterized South Korea’s violent modernization. Gillis reveals that Taekwondo’s origins did not emerge in medieval Korea, but among the thousands of Koreans who migrated or were kidnapped to Japan. The lives of most Korean migrants in the Japanese Empire were characterized by grinding poverty and routine terror by roving fascist gangs. One of the most gruesome examples of anti-immigrant terror was when 2,000 Koreans were massacred in the aftermath of the Great Kanto earthquake. Naturally, the most hot blooded of these migrants learned Karate as a means of self defense. When the Japanese empire fell, they moved back to their homeland and set up karate gyms, which became a hotbed for street gangs and soldiers. These karate gyms, or kwans, would become the seeds for what would later be known as taekwondo. 

​Many of Taekwondo’s pioneers would be conscripted in their country’s civil war, where they would make their name. One of those men was Nam Tae Hi. In 1952, Nam enraged his commanding officer, who sent Nam’s unit on a suicide mission into no man’s land where they were soon caught up in a three day offensive by the People’s Liberation Army. To his horror, Nam realized that he’d run out of bullets before the Chinese ran out of bodies. The morning after the battle, Nam discovered that he was sleeping on the bodies of several dozen Chinese soldiers he had beaten to death with his bare hands.
 
The battle would traumatize Nam for the rest of his life, but when Choi heard Nam’s story he recruited him to train other South Korean soldiers in what could still largely be considered Karate. Nam was so integral to ensuring Taekwondo’s emergence from obscurity, that it was he who broke the twelve roof tiles in front of South Korea’s first president and strongman, Rhee Syngman. Rhee was so pleased with the display that he gave Choi approval to build a martial arts gym inside a military base in Gangwon. Choi called this gym the Oh Do Kwan, “the Gym of My Way.” Funny enough, it was Rhee who gave Choi the idea for the name Taekwondo. When Choi told Rhee that Nam had used Karate to smash those tiles, the president bizarrely insisted that what Nam practiced wasn’t Karate, but instead was Taekkyon, a Korean street game. Before the war, Rhee was a noted independence activist and could not accept that what he saw was Japanese, so Choi rolled with it. Taekkyeon as one of Taekwondo’s origins was another lie that was propagated for decades. Taekwondo had taken over the military, but it would take another strongman for Taekwondo to be elevated to a national pastime. 

​Like Choi, Park Chung Hee came from humble beginnings. The son of disgraced aristocrats turned farmers, his mother tried to have Park aborted several times because she did not believe they could feed another mouth. These fears were not unfounded as malnourishment would stunt Park’s height at five foot four. Nevertheless, Park worked his way out of poverty and secured a comfortable job at a middle school, but he quickly grew bored with the banal life of a teacher. So in 1939, Park wrote an oath to the emperor in his own blood and mailed the letter to the Manchukuo Military Academy. 22 years later, Park stormed the presidential palace with a submachine gun, becoming South Korea’s first military dictator.
 
To legitimize his rule, Park based his regime on Minjok, a particular form of ethno-nationalism. The core tenets of Minjok are the purity of the Korean identity (sunsuseong) and the obligation to regularly uplift Korea's cultural superiority (uwolseong). However, Park detested Korea’s past, especially the Joseon dynasty, whom he blamed for his family’s poverty and the nation’s capitulation to foreign powers. He once proclaimed that “we should set ablaze all our history that was more like a storehouse of evil.” He didn’t quite set Korea’s history ablaze, but he did rewrite it. While ethnonationalism precedes the Park regime, it was during this era that it enveloped South Korea with such brashness. It was a time “when Hangul was the world’s most beautiful writing system, when the mountains and rivers of Korea possessed the best vistas on the globe, and when Koreans were the smartest people on the planet.” Park Chung Hee’s transformation of South Korean society was premised on the “restoration” of what he called Korea’s pure culture; one defined by patriotism and military strength which had been erased during the period of colonial rule.
 
Taekwondo’s ferocity as a killing art and fabricated history was the perfect tool to symbolize Park’s new Korea. Park elevated Taekwondo to a national sport, made it a mainstay in the country’s mass games, and eventually introduced it in every classroom, all in the service of  “reinforcing the positive image of a strong martial leader.” In 1972, the Kukkiwon was established, the same year that a rigged plebiscite passed the Yushin constitution, which enacted a series of reforms that transformed the entire country into a giant bootcamp. Guitars and long hair were banned and police officers would carry around rulers to measure women’s skirts, all things popularly associated with South Korea’s dissident student population.
 
For all it’s flair of restoring national purity, South Korean nationalism came from the same Japanese origin as Taekwondo. Park’s reforms were directly inspired by the Meiji restoration, when Japanese noblemen passed a series of westernizing reforms under the guise of “restoring the emperor.” Even the name Yushin, which means renewal, has the same Chinese characters as Meiji, and just like the architects of the Meiji restoration, Taekwondo’s leaders were not satisfied with taking over the country, they desired to expand beyond their provincial borders, even if it would take another war.

Only one year after the Korean War “ended,” Western powers divided another Asian country into a Communist North and an Anti-Communist South. Park Chung Hee rapidly deployed 320,000 soldiers to Vietnam in order to access the billions of dollars in US aid that he would use to fund the meteoric economic growth that many call “the Miracle on the Han River.”
 
The South Koreans had earned a reputation in Vietnam for ruthless efficiency. In 1966, a reporter from Time magazine wrote;
 
To Westerners, the process sometimes seems as brutal as it is effective. Suspects [the Viet Cong] are encouraged to talk by a rifle fired just past the ear from behind while they are sitting on the edge of an open grave, or by a swift, cheekbone-shattering flick of a Korean’s bare hand.
 
While we look now at such a statement with horror, the South Korean military took pride in their role as America’s “Hessians,” seeing Vietnam as a means to compensate for playing an auxiliary role in their own country’s civil war. Many veterans would eventually use the counterinsurgency tactics they tempered in Vietnam to suppress pro-democracy protests in their homeland.
 
The Koreans used this notoriety to evangelize Taekwondo to the Americans and South Vietnamese, even sending instructors to the ARVN special forces training center. But, Taekwondo really exploded in 1967 when 250 Korean marines repelled nearly a thousand NVA and VC soldiers in Tra Binh. The “mythmaking marines,” as they were called, earned the respect of their American counterparts, due to their preference for using their hands over a bayonet. Curiously, one of the first Americans to earn a black belt was Robert Walson, who first discovered Taekwondo when he was a CIA agent in Vietnam.

​While public opinion was turning against the war in Vietnam, Choi was building a global empire through what he knew best, showmanship. His legendary Ace team were huge hits at military bases in West Germany, Singapore, and even Egypt. Aside from the usual ensemble of flying kicks and smashing bricks, brawling with spectators became a regular occurrence and the real money maker. Wherever the Ace team went, a new Taekwondo gym opened up, many suspiciously overnight.
 
Though we can’t talk about Taekwondo’s reach abroad without Jhoon Rhee, “the father of American Taekwondo.” Rhee was close friends with a lot of future martial arts stars, including Chuck Norris, who had learned Taekwondo while he was an airman stationed in Osan. In 1965, Rhee convinced NBC to film his second national championship, but the suits at the network were so shocked by the violence that they only aired snippets.
 
One thing that Taekwondo had going for it was it’s brutally powerful kicks. In South Korea, the White Claw, plain clothed police officers who sported motorcycle helmets, found these kicks useful in cracking the skulls of students, but in America they became popular in the national Karate circuit. As one American Karate champion explained, “The Japanese had poor kicks compared to the Koreans. We kicked to hurt.”
 
All of this was possible thanks to the generosity of the KCIA, the South Korean secret police. The KCIA had created a global mafia that extorted millionaires, ran businesses, tortured dissidents, and was shrouded in so much secrecy that even the US government didn’t fully know what they were up to. Thanks to its international associations, status as a legal business, and steady crop of fighters, Taekwondo had become one of the KCIA’s biggest fronts. Many of Taekwondo’s founding fathers had connections to the KCIA. Nam Tae Hi was on the KCIA bankroll from 1965 to ‘72. Kim Un Yong, the founder of the World Taekwondo Federation, was a senior spy. Jhoon Rhee had deep connections to both the KCIA and the Unification church, a cult founded by Sun Myung Moon, a staunch anticommunist whose followers (popularly referred to as “moonies”) believe is the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. During Rhee’s 2nd Karate tournament, the same one aired on NBC, you could see the Korean Ambassador and Rev. Sun Myung Moon sitting in the front row.
 
The KCIA’s secret dealings would be exposed in 1967 when West German authorities had discovered that Yu Isang, a prominent composer, had boarded a plane to South Korea without a passport or plane ticket. The KCIA had kidnapped Yun and over a hundred other Koreans, where they were tortured and forced to issue false confessions of spying for the North. The East Berlin Case, as it was later dubbed, sparked international outrage, but what was less known was that many of the agents involved in the kidnappings were Taekwondo instructors. One of Choi’s students, Kim Kwang Il, was later discovered to be one of the KCIA agents involved in the kidnappings. Another Taekwondo instructor involved in the East Berlin Case, Lee Gye Hoon, eventually rose to the position of deputy director of the KCIA.
 
As much controversy as these incidents created, Taekwondo, like the South Korean economy, seemed to grow with no end in sight. In 1981, the new military dictator, Chun Do Hwan, sent KCIA agents Kim Un Yong and “Pistol Park” Kyong Chu on a secret mission to secure South Korea the seat to host the 1988 Olympics. Operation Thunderbird, as it was called, involved several Taekwondo instructors and an absurd amount of bribery but it worked. That September, the IOC selected Seoul as the host for the 1988 Summer Olympics, beating out the frontrunner, Nagoya, Japan. To add icing on the cake, Taekwondo would be for the first time introduced to the Olympics as a demonstration sport. 35 nations would compete in what was an obscure martial art only 30 years ago. As one article in the Korean Journal put it, Taekwondo had achieved what “Korea’s most skilled diplomats have been unable to accomplish, that is, bring the citizens of advanced western countries to an attitude of respect before the Korean flag.”

​However, acceptance into the exclusive club of the Olympics would prove to be Taekwondo’s peak. The 1987 revolution led to the demotion of the military clique and in turn the rise of the chaebols, the country’s oligarchs. Taekwondo quickly proved to be ill fit for the new era. South Korea needed a new mascot, one that better suited the nation’s transition from a scrappy mercenary to a commercial powerhouse. That mascot would be found almost a decade later when H.O.T popped into the scene, kickstarting the Kpop phenomenon. Macho men breaking boards were replaced with “flower boy” idols, whose androdynous appearances ironically resembled the mythical “Hwarang warriors” more than Taekwondo’s most grizzled veterans.
 
Even as this was taking place, Taekwondo’s foundations were already being eroded by its very own leaders. The Olympics had no place for the blood and broken bones that characterized early championships. In order to enter the Olympics, Taekwondo had to be civilized. The World Taekwondo Federation introduced safety pads, a refined (but still easily riggable) point system, and most notoriously no more punches to the head, turning Taekwondo into the white whitewashed sport that many detractors now derogatorily call “foot fencing.”
 
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to say that Korea has not preserved the original spirit of Taekwondo, it just wasn’t the one in the South. In 1979, Choi Hong Hi shocked the world when he defected to North Korea. Just like in the South, Choi built up Taekwondo’s prestige by integrating the martial art into the Korean People’s Army, which every North Korean male is required to serve in for eight years. As previously mentioned, Choi’s own son would later be arrested in West Germany for training North Korean commandos who had infiltrated the country.
 
While it may seem surprising that a former South Korean general would defect to the communist North, many years prior, Choi had nearly died in a Japanese jail for attempting to defect to Kim Il Sung’s partisans in Manchuria. That experience gave Choi a deep seated hatred for the collaborators who rose up to lead the South Korean government, including Park Chung Hee, himself. Choi’s relationship with the junta had soured so badly, that even before he defected, the government had banned Choi’s federation from the country.
 
Today in North Korea you can still see army commandos practicing “the original form of Taekwondo.” You might even see them practice the final form Choi Hong Hee ever designed, Juche. 

The history of Taekwondo brings up a greater question on what masculinity means to the left. Gillis’s book is regularly filled with stories of high ranking officers dancing drunk and KCIA agents punching politicians. Choi Hong Hi had even once joked that to do politics in Taekwondo, one had to be good at drinking, gambling, fighting, and have at least one mistress. It should not come as a surprise then that Taekwondo’s founders named their martial art inside of a geisha house.
 
Martial arts always had a strong allure among alienated young men by offering a means to reclaim their lost agency and self-respect. Taekwondo, and the peninsula’s broader militarization, promised to overcome what many nationalists at the time called “the rape of Korea.” But what happens when that promise was achieved by reproducing the same relationship of colonial terror and humiliation. This desire to overcome Korean’s perceived inferiority complex caused Choi to develop a lifelong obsession to prove that his martial art was superior to its Japanese brother. During a show in Egypt, a soldier had privately shown Choi that he could smash a small oblong stone in half with a karate chop. Choi found the display so threatening that he ordered someone find a stone ten times as large and had one of his Ace team members smash the rock to pieces.
 
However, it is vital that we remember that Taekwondo didn’t start in the backrooms of the KCIA or war crimes committed in Vietnam, but among immigrant communities in the center of the Great East Co-Prosperity Sphere. This legacy still survives to this day in the very organization that embodies all things reactionary in the martial art, the World Taekwondo Federation. The WTF takes a lot of pride in sending instructors to migrant enclaves and countries in the periphery, which has caused the martial art to develop a reputation as a leveler for poorer nations in the Olympics. In 2008, celebrations erupted all across Afghanistan when Rohullah Nikpai clinched his country's first Olympic medal after he defeated two time champion Juan Antonio Ramos. Rohullah had first applied for the Afghan national team at a refugee camp in Iran.
 
Taekwondo is a story about a failed decolonization project. It is part of a greater history when the South Korean state tried to create a new Korean identity, one they felt the people could take pride in, but required leaving in place the oppressive forces that had stolen their agency in the first place. But more than anything else, Taekwondo is a story of survival. 



Bibliography

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1. Beech, H. (2021, July 25). Taekwondo Is Path to Medals for Countries That Rarely Get Them. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/25/sports/olympics/taekwondo-olympics-medals.html.
2. Capener, S. D. (2016). The Making of a Modern Myth: Inventing a Tradition for Taekwondo. Korea Journal, 56(1), 61–92.
3. Cobra Kai, the twilight of American Empire, and The Allure of Paramilitary Violence. Los Angeles Review of Books. (2021, June 8). Retrieved January 22, 2022, from https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/cobra-kai-the-twilight-of-american-empire-and-the-allure-of-paramilitary-violence
4. Gillis, A. (2016). A killing art: The Untold History of Taekwondo. ECW Press.
5. USA Today. (2008, August 20). Afghanistan in awe after winning first Olympic medal. usatoday30.Usatoday.com. Retrieved from https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/olympics/beijing/fight/2008-08-20-afghan-medalist_N.htm.

One of The International Magazine slogans is “Yes, We Are Biased”. Why do you think this is important to say?

The dominant media loves to tout itself as ‘objective’ and ‘unbiased,’ however, as us communists know, they are beholden to the owners of capital. None of them are sources for authentic news. This is where we step in. The International Magazine is biased towards the working masses and the betterment of the world. We don’t merely report News, we strive to find out the truth- we provide analysis, commentary, a deeper understanding of things. We are openly anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and anti-fascist and we proudly boast our credentials in our website given below: 

www.internationalmagz.com

We indeed are biased and openly claim so. With us, there is no subtle form of indoctrination that comes with the consumption of other forms of media. You get exactly what you pay for. 

What does your magazine do and how?

There is no dearth of left led media outlets, and magazines. But is that enough? Often democratic socialist, these outlets are parochial and do not give news from the world over. Our magazine is a tad bit different from the usual order of things. As the name suggests, the magazine advocates for communism worldwide. Staying true to its name, it is run by noted communists from all over the globe. There is no other magazine quite like it. Articles by people such as Gennedy Zyuganov (General Secretary, Communist Party of Russian Federation) , Arun Chaudhary (first official videographer of the White House) and noted academics like Asatar Bair have been published. The International Magazine is published by Progressive Thinkers, run by Subhasree Adhikary, Shuvam Banerjee, and Mr Debojit Banerjee, and does NOT rely on any sort of corporate funding. 

We primarily rely on our readers who come from all walks of life. The magazine today has been growing steadily, which has been possible only due to our coterie of extremely loyal readers dedicated to furthering the ideology of communism. Each and every article published is carefully curated by our editorial team which consists of 35 dedicated communists, which includes Roman Kokonenko from Russia who is a Central Committee member of the Communist Party of Russian Federation (CPRF), Robin Talbot from Britain who is the Chairman of Young Communist League (YCL) Britain, Darrell Rankin from Canada – a Marxist intellectual, Sonja Beier from Austria – International Officer of KJO, Mariana Ruiz from Venezuela – a Central leader of Partido Comunista de Venezuela (PCV), Dloze Matooane who is a leader from South Africa and many more. 

Apart from this, we also keep our readers abreast with popular movements by engaging with them via Twitter. There are 2 sections, one of them consists of a blog, which is updated daily, and another is a paid subscription to our magazine which we publish monthly. The blog is free for whoever chooses to get authentic news from all over the world, especially Africa, which is often ignored by the mainstream media. The paid monthly magazine consists of a series of articles concerning popular movements, movie reviews, book reviews and various socio-economic issues. It also provides with an in-depth commentary on pop culture. 

How did The International Magazine come about?

The magazine is the fruit of the joint efforts of Debojit Banerjee, Shuvam Banerjee, Sourav Chakraborty and Gourab Ghosh. The four of them have been working at the grassroots for years, all involved with AISF (All India Students’ Federation) and CPI. Other than being largely responsible for the magazine, these men have day jobs as well. Mr. Chakraborty happens to be a practicing lawyer and the Joint Secretary of AISF West Bengal State Council. Shuvam Banerjee is the National president of AISF and a National Council member of Communist Party of India (CPI).  Debojit Banerjee is a master’s degree student and a state executive member of AISF. Mr. Gourab Ghosh is also a master’s student and State Council member for the same organization.
 
What sets The International Magazine apart?

A magazine of this kind is very hard to maintain and requires will, determination and an unwavering commitment to the ideology. There is no dearth of publications and news agencies in this day and age. But that in itself is the part of the problem. The founders of the magazine rightfully identified a vacuum left by the fall of the Soviet Union. ‘The fight between capitalism and communism is not merely electoral. It is ideological as well,’ says Mr. Debojit Banerjee. 'While our magazine turns one, we are in no mood to celebrate. Our goal is to get rid of the current system of oppression and we shall work tirelessly towards it,’ he adds. Thus, an alternative media needs to be established. In the good old days of the Soviet Union, left wing publications thrived worldwide. The USSR sowed its seeds everywhere, provided them with the latest technology for winning the class struggle. Its dissolution is felt today. Our magazine strives to be THE alternative. Our competitors are not just the shameless media which tows the line of capitalists, but also so-called center left outlets who have betrayed the revolution. We are red to the core and shall continue being so.

The world is fearful of possible war once again. This time the hotspot is Ukraine, with the accompanying crisis there and the fact that two of the adversaries, the U.S. and Russia, are the two largest nuclear powers on Earth.

Obviously not good! But there is a way out of the crisis and a way to preserve the peace. We can only arrive at a solution, however, if we understand how the situation got to this point and who it is that’s responsible for getting us here.

The dominant outlets of the U.S. corporate press—whether conservative or liberal in their outlook; on television, online, or in print—are ringing alarm bells, saying Russian President Vladimir Putin has amassed troops and is plotting an invasion of his neighbor. Why?

It is helpful to understand that all countries, the U.S. included, have core strategic interests that, if violated, can force them into taking military action and going to war.

To understand the Russian view of NATO’s possible expansion and placement of weapons or troops in Ukraine—which multiple U.S. administrations, including the current one, have threatened—a simple thought experiment is useful. Since the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. has declared the entirety of the Western Hemisphere as a core strategic interest. It would never tolerate Russian or Chinese weapons being placed in countries directly on its border, such as Canada or Mexico. But a situation just like that is what Russia’s leaders fear.
​
Russia cannot tolerate NATO weaponry (like the U.S.-managed nuclear weapons NATO has in Germany) to be stationed right along its borders in Ukraine. Missiles that can reach Moscow in five minutes or less are a definite no-no.

Then and now, 40% or more of the population in Ukraine was and is Russian. The productive industrial part of Ukraine in the east is almost entirely Russian by language and ethnicity. Millions of families in the country are headed by parents of different ethnicities, one of whom is Ukrainian and the other Russian. Even Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine today, was a well-known Russian-speaking comedian before he ran for that office. He started speaking Ukrainian, however, after he was elected. The short story is that there should be no ethnic basis for hostility between Ukraine and Russia.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the aim of the U.S. and NATO, along with the militarist wing of the European Union, has been to separate Ukraine from Russia, making it a bulwark on Russia’s border. Russia, of course, has declared that this simply will not happen.

The aim of grabbing Ukraine is connected to overall NATO and EU expansion eastward which began first with grabbing the Czech Republic and Poland. Both of these countries were formerly part of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact military alliance, which was formed to defend against NATO during the Cold War.

In the case of Ukraine, as is most often the case with such NATO militarism, the operation is disguised as one intended to “spread democracy.” So in the case of Ukraine, the idea spread far and wide in the Western corporate media and from the governments involved over the last few years has been that Ukraine was not being separated from Russia by a fascist coup backed by the West but rather by an “Orange Revolution” in which democracy was the aim.

We know, of course, that once the so-called “Orange Revolution” happened, political parties—including left and progressive parties like the Communist Party—were banned, use of the Russian language inside Ukraine was banned, hundreds of trade unionists were killed, and the poisoned food grown in the radiation-contaminated Chernobyl region was back on sale for consumption by Ukrainians.
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The “democratic” government turned control over the police and the military to historically well-known fascist organizations. They remain in the control of those fascist organizations today. “Promoting democracy” is the excuse the U.S. always uses when it wants to topple a regime it does not support. Examples are numerous—Grenada, Chile, Cuba, Iraq, Syria—and the list could go on.

​In 1999, NATO—in violation of U.S. assurances made years earlier at the end of the Cold War—took the first step of its own “invasion” by expanding into Poland and the Czech Republic. Russia, totally devastated economically following the destruction of the Soviet Union, was too weak at the time to mount any serious opposition.

When the West saw that this worked and that they could get away with it, in 2004 they moved into the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia—former Soviet Republics. Keep in mind that U.S. troops and weapons are now in all these countries, under the guise of those NATO deployments. German troops are there too, entering those countries for the first time since the USSR drove out Nazi forces from all those places as it shut down networks of concentration camps that they operated.

The “democracy” that has resulted in these countries is dubious indeed. Poland is practically a fascist dictatorship today. In Latvia, it is illegal to teach anything about the death factories that Hitler’s forces ran when they occupied the country. There, too, the Communist and left other political parties are banned. It should be noted that all these right-wing measures are supposedly forbidden by the EU constitution but ignored by the leadership of the EU countries.

Back to Ukraine and fast forward to November 2013. The elected president of Ukraine at the time, Victor Yanukovych, was negotiating with the EU to move Ukraine closer to the EU but not by directly joining. He wanted to broker an economic deal that would benefit Ukraine, the EU, Russia, and even the IMF, if possible. Via Ukraine, the EU could access Russian energy resources and Russia would gain new customers. As the intermediary, Ukraine could win financially by playing the pipeline middle man and getting cheaper gas for itself. Yanukovych’s rationale: Why not have a cooperative peaceful deal beneficial to all parties?

The all-or-nothing people in the West who wanted to control Ukraine, however, said no. The EU wanted Ukraine to keep paying inflated prices and to stick to a burdensome debt repayment schedule. Putin then offered Ukraine a deal much better than what the EU was offering—Russian gas for up to a third less and help paying off debt. Yanukovych, who did not want to impose the austerity on his people that the EU was demanding, accepted Putin’s offer.
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In response, the nationalist right wing in Ukraine, led by openly fascist organizations, began to whip up protests. Yanukovych overreacted with police violence against demonstrators, and many were killed. Things spiraled out of control, and he fled to Russia as a fascist coup openly backed by the U.S. seized control in Kiev under the guise of “restoring law and order.” Again, EU and NATO expansionist desires were resulting in bloodshed.

The Russians then closed checkpoints in Crimea, a peninsula in the Black Sea that had been administered by Ukraine since the 1950s despite the fact that 90% of the population was Russian. This arrangement had been agreed to in the Soviet days because of Crimea’s physical proximity to Ukraine. Vast amounts of Ukrainian territory separate Crimea from the rest of Russia. Under the extension of that treaty when the USSR was dismantled, Russian troops remained in Crimea in order to protect the nuclear-capable base that was there.

The much-hyped Russian “invasion” of Crimea in 2014 then was actually an effort to close off the area and protect it and the nuclear base from the fascists running Kiev. The Russian troops were already there with the agreement of Ukraine.

A vote was held shortly after and the people of Crimea chose to return to the Russian administration. Making up the overwhelming majority of the population, how could they vote otherwise as they watched fascist Ukrainian troops killing Russians in eastern Ukraine and a Ukrainian government forbidding the use of their own language?

As volatile as the situation was at the time, the Russians did not follow this with an invasion of Ukraine. What they did essentially was tell the West to back off. Putin did not want a wider war. What Russia’s leaders were refusing to accept was NATO being planted on their border with dangerous weapons pointing at them.

Continued efforts after those events by NATO and the EU to push eastward and take in Ukraine have been nothing less than both dangerous and criminal. Those policies have endangered the whole world.
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Even Friday, it was announced by Blinken that, after an initial meeting with the Russians, talks will continue. It is clear the Russians do not want to invade Ukraine. They do have troops along the border with Ukraine, but those troops are on Russian territory and are positioned as leverage to protect their borders and stop NATO expansionism.

Back to the issue of vital strategic interests. Keeping dangerous weapons in service of the West away from its borders is in the vital strategic interests of Russia. What happens in Ukraine is of critical importance to the survival of Russia. From Napoleon to the Kaiser to Hitler, Russia has been invaded too many times from Europe, and it is understandably determined to maintain a militarily non-aligned buffer zone on its border.

By contrast, Ukraine is emphatically not in the strategic interests of the United States. The U.S., in fact, would benefit from peace in that region and certainly not benefit in any way if there were a war involving the two big nuclear powers. Nor would Ukraine benefit from such a war. Nor would Russia or the rest of the world.

This situation, which took so many years to develop, can only be solved in one way. It is a simple solution: NATO and the U.S. must promise that Ukraine will never become a part of NATO. That is the indispensable first step.

It’s what was agreed to as part of the efforts to end the Cold War.

It’s what Putin and Yanukovych wanted when they tried to broker an EU-Ukraine-Russia-IMF deal all those years ago. How stupid and dangerous it was for the U.S. to say no.

End all NATO expansion eastward!
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C.J. Atkins contributed to this article.

China is leading an international effort to develop alliances to counter US hegemony.

In March 2021, 17 nations — many led by anti-imperialist and progressive governments, including Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia among others — formed a diplomatic alliance called the Group of Friends in Defense of the Charter of the United Nations, which seeks to defend sovereignty and multilateralism against the unilateral domination of the United States and Western Europe.

This January 20, China’s mission to the UN launched a new, economic version of this diplomatic alliance, called the Group of Friends of the Global Development Initiative.

This new Group of Friends seeks to promote China’s “Global Development Initiative” (GDI), and complements China’s massive international infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative.

Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the creation of the GDI at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2021. He said the campaign aims at promoting “people-centered,” environmentally friendly development, with the primary goals of reducing poverty, helping formerly colonized countries in the Global South, and eventually achieving carbon neutrality.
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To this end, Beijing has sought to merge the GDI with the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The new Group of Friends of the Global Development Initiative launched this January 20 consists of countries who have joined China in its GDI.

In the founding meeting, Beijing’s ambassador cautioned against “unilateralism” and the “resurgent Cold-War mentality and the clamoring for ‘decoupling’” — a clear reference to the aggressive campaigns waged by Washington and Brussels.

The Chinese ambassador explained that the GDI “is a platform for mutually beneficial and win-win cooperation.”

While the United States and European Union have tried to recruit countries in a global Cold War Two alliance against China and Russia, Beijing made it clear that the GDI “is open and inclusive, and will not create any kind of small circles.”

Representatives of the following nations participated in this founding meeting of the Group of Friends of the Global Development Initiative, alongside China:

• Belarus
• Benin
• Bolivia
• Burundi
• Cambodia
• Cuba
• Chile
• Djibouti
• Dominica
• DPRK
• El Salvador
• Eritrea
• Ethiopia
• Gabon
• Guinea
• Indonesia
• Iran
• Kazakhstan
• Nicaragua
• Pakistan
• Peru
• Qatar
• Russia
• Saudi Arabia
• Serbia
• Singapore
• Syria
• Tajikistan
• Thailand
• United Arab Emirates
• Uzbekistan
• Venezuela
• Vietnam
• Yemen
• Zimbabwe

Unlike the Group of Friends in Defense of the Charter of the United Nations, the Group of Friends of the Global Development Initiative is not clearly anti-imperialist. It includes, for example, the reactionary Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, which collaborate with Western imperialism. And some other members are certainly not progressive friends of national-liberation struggles.

But this new economic alliance shows the foundations for the structure of the new multipolar world being built, which is no longer dominated by US unipolar hegemony.

In this increasingly multipolar world, we can expect to see more contradictory moves by countries like the Gulf monarchies, which are trying to balance the rise of China against the United States to their mutual benefit.

This process is full of contradictions, but it part of a general weakening of US imperialism, and creates more political, economic, and diplomatic space for progressive and revolutionary forces in countries like Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and beyond to not only survive but to thrive and advance.
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At the founding meeting, China’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Zhang Jun, explained Beijing’s thinking behind the new Group of Friends:

The creation of the Group of Friends of the Global Development Initiative is just one of a series of very interesting diplomatic moves happening behind the scenes. These developments don’t get coverage in mainstream corporate media because they’re not very sexy, but they are important.

The launch got zero coverage in the mainstream English-language corporate media. Chinese state-backed media outlets did cover the event though.

The Group of Friends in Defense of the Charter of the United Nations, the diplomatic complement to the Group of Friends of the Global Development Initiative, was formed in March 2021 by the following 16 UN member states and Palestine (a UN observer state):

• Algeria
• Angola
• Belarus
• Bolivia
• Cambodia
• China
• Cuba
• DPRK
• (Equatorial Guinea later joined)
• Eritrea
• Iran
• Lao
• Nicaragua
• Palestine
• Russia
• Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
• Syria
• Venezuela

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Both the diplomatic and the economic alliance are still very young, but expect to hear more about these Groups of Friends in the future. These are the seeds that have been planted for a new multipolar international order.