THE SWEDISH Communist Party (SKP) has slammed the decision of the ruling Social Democratic Party to back the country’s membership of the Nato military alliance announced on Monday.

It said the stunning policy reversal which ends 200 years of neutrality is linked to the aspirations of Swedish capital to secure its sphere of influence and defend its investments abroad.

“It is inevitable that the contradictions within the entire capitalist-imperialist system are intensifying and each country’s capital seeks the most profitable investments and the best conditions for its growth,” the communists said.

Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson announced that her party had dropped its long-standing opposition to Nato membership in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and was seeking accession as soon as possible.

But the SKP said the decision was in breach of her own party’s Congress decisions, including a statement passed as recently as November 2021 which described military non-alignment as “a foundation of Sweden’s security policy.”

The SDP was resolute on the threat posed by Nato membership and firmly ruled out joining the imperialist bloc.

“Of course, the security policy situation has changed,” the communists said. “The Swedish investments abroad are now more threatened than 10 years ago because the contradictions have been sharpened.

“That is why Swedish politicians act to defend their own investments and they cannot do it by themselves. So, it's pretty simple: When the capital calls, congressional decisions mean nothing.”

Finnish communists voiced similar opposition to Helsinki’s plans to join Nato warning that it places the country at risk of war and would deepen regional militarisation.

However the membership aspirations of both countries are opposed by Turkey which is threatening to veto their accession.

Ankara accuses Sweden and Finland of harbouring terrorists, linked to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
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Turkey has demanded the extradition of a number of alleged PKK supporters, security guarantees and an end to an arms embargo in return for its support.

Feature photo | MintPress News | AP

OCCUPIED EAST JERUSALEM — On April 29, Inès Abdel Razek woke up to 80 new Twitter followers.

“These accounts were following the exact same people that were tweeting about Palestine, but from France or Francophone accounts that work on Palestine,” Razek said of her new followers.

The advocacy director of Rābet, the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy’s digital platform, became wary of the issue after Abier Khateb, a grants manager at Open Society Foundations, reported mass followings as well.

Razek told MintPress News that she began individually reporting each account as fake but kept her own account open — lest she let the alleged bots win. But after a few days, Razek made her profile private. At the peak of the mass following, Razek had accumulated 400 fake followers.

From the end of April through the first few weeks of May, more than 40 pro-Palestine Twitter accounts reported mass followings. Digital-rights experts say acquiring huge amounts of fake followers triggers Twitter’s algorithm and can lead to the tech giant suspending an account, effectively censoring users by forcing them to make their accounts private.

These accounts included those belonging to human rights and activist organizations Adalah, Combatants for Peace, Breaking the Silence, and Al Mezan Center for Human Rights. They also included news publications and journalists, like The Palestine Chronicle, Ali Abunimah and Hind Al-Eryani; and politicians, such as Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Kingdom. Twitter did not respond to MintPress inquiries on the source of the suspicious accounts.

Dr. Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor at Hamad bin Khalifa University, conducted an analysis that found more than 1,150 fake accounts. Twitter deleted approximately 1,090 of these accounts, according to Jones. His analysis determined that the average account-creation time was one to three per minute, suggesting these accounts were created using an automated process.
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The profiles were in various languages, including French, Spanish, English and German, but usually had Arabic bios. They often had strange names — like Noble Betty Thomas — and zero followers.

“They had clearly made-up names,” Sarah Leah Whitson, who also experienced a large influx of new followers, told MintPress. “The vast majority of them had Israeli names and Israeli addresses. Some of them had made-up Arab names, which were mangled. It’s clear that they’re [using] stolen images of people.”
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In response to the bulk followings, software developer Daniel Easterman created a free script to automatically report and block hundreds of these bots for users.

Easterman said the spamming problem has a censorship effect by forcing users to make their accounts private. “This means they won’t be able to distribute their messages widely as they would normally,” Easterman told MintPress News.

Another area of particular concern is how a flood of fake followers may cause Twitter to shut down an account. “When you see such a dramatic increase in followers, it’s usually somebody manipulating the system for commercial gain,” Easterman said. “So that could trigger Twitter to automatically flag that as suspicious activity and suspend the activist’s account.”

Using Twitter to target human rights defenders and journalists isn’t unusual. In 2017, journalist Iona Craig and others who report on Yemen were spammed with thousands of fake followers. Many speculated the culprits were state entities belonging to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
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The reason behind this particular mass following campaign remains unknown. Jones hypothesized it’s acting as a form of social media suppression, writing on Twitter:

Razek, Whitson, and others told MintPress that the flood of fake followers appears to be diminishing for them. However, a new operation has emerged.

In the past week, Jones found around 2,800 fake accounts following pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist accounts who have recently been tweeting on the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh.

“This network is likely the same as the one found at [the] end of April, although now it is active,” Jones wrote on Twitter.

The accounts have between 0 to 20 followers, with the majority of bios written in English and simply stating the account location, which is Israel. Most accounts don’t have a banner picture and the profile pictures have purportedly been swiped from real people.

According to Jones, the accounts have begun liking and retweeting posts, without any real partisan regularity: they like both pro- and anti-Palestinian subject matter and follow both pro-Zionist and pro-Palestinian accounts but appear to target the pro-Palestinian side more. Accounts targeted include The Jerusalem Post; the government of Israel’s official state account; activist organization Jewish Voice for Peace; the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement; Israeli journalist Ilan Pappe; and former Palestinian Liberation Organization executive committee member Dr. Hanan Ashrawi.
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Again, the reason for the bulk followers remains unclear. “Those who get followed understandably find it intimidating, as if a form of surveillance or a technique to try and degrade [the] quality of an account with low-quality follows,” Jones wrote on Twitter. “The fact remains, these are clearly fake accounts and ruin the experience of Twitter.”

Palestinian digital-rights experts have long decried the increasing censorship of Palestinian content online. During Israel’s assault on Gaza and the upticks in Israeli attacks at Al-Aqsa Compound and in Sheikh Jarrah in May 2021, Palestinian activists reported social media companies were removing their content on Israeli violence and ethnic cleansing for violating community guidelines.

The social media censorship didn’t stop when tensions died down over the summer, though. Last month, social media users in Jordan said their posts related to Israeli violence at Al-Aqsa were taken down and their accounts blocked. Additionally, accounts belonging to Palestinian news publications covering the violence in occupied East Jerusalem and at Al-Aqsa were deactivated by Facebook.

In their recent monthly report on social media violations, Palestinian NGO Sada Social stated the deletion of Palestinian content “is in line with and in response to Israeli requests to tighten the screws on Palestinians and their media.”
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Palestinian-American model Bella Hadid also accused Instagram of shadow-banning (having content viewership limited) her pro-Palestinian content during Ramadan.

Razek suggested the swarm of fake followers on Twitter may be an extension of Instagram’s alleged shadow-banning. “The purpose is to pollute our algorithms and make our accounts less visible. So in the way that Instagram is shadow-banning some content, this could be a way that Twitter shadow-bans our content,” she said.
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While the identities behind the fake followers haven’t been revealed, many have pointed to Israel. The Israeli government’s targeting of Palestinian digital content is well-documented. According to 7amleh – The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, the Israeli Ministry of Justice Cyber Unit sends content-removal requests aimed at Palestinian content to social media companies such as Facebook, Google, and YouTube. The Justice Ministry has boasted these corporations comply with 95% of their requests. And Israeli governmental organizations and NGOs also encourage their citizens to flag Palestinian content for removal.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s pending purchase of Twitter came with a promise of securing free speech on the digital platform. “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” the self-declared free-speech advocate said in a statement about his Twitter deal.

While digital-rights experts like Jones are wary of Musk’s potential Twitter takeover, Whitson, who’s experienced targeted attacks, harassment, and censorship threats for decades for speaking out against Israeli abuses, views the buyout positively.  For the executive director of nonprofit Democracy for the Arab World (DAWN), the risk of corporate censorship is a bigger issue than online hate speech. Whitson said:

Whitson doesn’t agree the bots are a form of censorship, but she does see them as an assault on free speech. “It’s a form of targeted harassment and bullying,” she said. “It’s a targeted attack on people who are speaking freely, including journalists and human rights activists.”

This article was republished from Mintpress News.

​Yellow Journalism of the Hearst Era Is Alive and Well in the 21st Century

There is a wise old maxim that says, “The first step on the road to wisdom is to call things by their right names.” So, let’s do that.

“Fake News” has been around a long while: The New York Sun’s “Great Moon Hoax” of 1835 is a good (and amusing) example. An absolute falsehood and fantasy was published as fact to a credulous public who ate it up.
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The Sun claimed that life existed on the Moon.

The practice of publishing false stories for financial or political motives has probably been around much longer than that, but today it has been elevated to a science and an art form, a black art form, that is truly one of the greatest threats to the future of Humanity in the world today. It is mass brainwashing on a global scale, abetted by science and technology, a war on human consciousness, a concentrated and deliberate attack on people’s ability to see reality and to discern fact from lies. It is a war against the truth.

It has been correctly said that a respect for the truth is the basis for all morality, so a war against the truth is a war against morality, against all that is good and decent. Without an ability to see reality and detect lies, without a moral compass, people are literally no more than dumb beasts, mules to be worked and exploited by their owners, or sheep to be led to the slaughter. “Fake news” is a term a bit too cute and cozy for the black art of intentionally erasing the very intellect and morality that makes us human. It seeks to dumb down and degrade Humanity to the point where people are no longer human. And that point is fast approaching and, for many, is already here.
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I want to give three concrete and irrefutable examples of genuine Nazi propaganda, produced by the West (U.S. and EU), about the war in Ukraine in just the last month, which not only attempt to cover up the crime of intentional mass murder attacks on civilians, but go further still and attempt to blame the actual victims for the crimes of U.S., EU and Ukrainian Nazis. You will see by these three indisputable examples how disinformation is used as a truly evil weapon, how to defend against it, and how to destroy it with the truth.

The Italian newspaper La Stampa published the photo above on March 15, 2022, showing a horrific scene of mass murder of civilians by illegal cluster munitions delivered to a city center by a ballistic missile. Some 24 civilians (including an entire family with two kids) were murdered, and dozens more gravely injured.

The headlines in red across the top—“Russia kills 400 in Mariupol, Kiev prepares for Russian attack.”

Emblazoned across the photo, “The Carnage.” The photo is real, and while the headlines are intentionally misleading, they are not outright lies. They do not have to be. The liars at La Stampa do not have to actually lie; most Europeans, like most U.S. citizens, lead busy lives, don’t look beyond the headlines, and are easily deceived by nothing more than insinuations. And propagandists like those at La Stampa know it.

I could tell you that the photo actually shows the results of a Ukrainian Army war crime by a Tochka-U missile that was intentionally launched at Donetsk city center around 12:00 noon on Monday, March 14th, that in fact it was intended to kill many times more than the 24 civilians who were murdered.

La Stampa misled its readers by failing to report on the right city where the attacks were launched—a city, Donetsk, that Ukraine, and not Russia, has been shelling for eight years.

I could tell you that the weekend before, fake Ukrop (Ukrainian Association of patriots) troll accounts on Russian and other social media spread false stories that the Democratic People’s Republic (DPR) administration would be giving news about the status of DPR soldiers at 12:30 on March 14th at the Administration Building in central Donetsk, and wives, mothers, daughters of soldiers should come there then.

This message was also sent by text message to specific phones of female family members of soldiers by spoofed DPR Administration accounts. I can confirm it, the daughter of one of my friends serving at the Front showed me the exact message on her phone.

I could tell you that the missile was intercepted by DPR air defense, and only two cannisters of cluster bomb sub-munitions actually detonated when they hit about 500 meters from the Administration Building, on University Avenue in central Donetsk and, had the missile reached its target, the death toll would have been in the hundreds.
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Maybe you would believe me, maybe some would not. But I can show you two photos that prove it.

Now what do you think of La Stampa’s work? Not only trying to cover up the intentional mass murder of civilians, but blaming the victims and their defenders for the very crimes of the Nazis that La Stampa and Italy support. 

This is a black lie, a damned lie, literally the exact opposite of the truth. And the vast majority of Western citizens lap up these lies.

And FYI, the photographer who took the heart-rending photo La Stampa stole was neither paid nor credited, or even asked permission to use his photo for this Italian version of Nazi propaganda.
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Well, you might say, it is an isolated incident, mistakes happen. It is neither isolated nor a mistake. The editors of La Stampa knew exactly where the photo was from and what it showed, and they used it intentionally to lie. And pseudo-journalists do the same thing in the USA.

Again, but an even more blatant intention to mislead, to lie. The photo, again, is the aftermath of a Ukrainian missile attack on a civilian residential area of Donetsk, not far from my home in Petrovsky District.

Another terrorist attack by Ukrop Nazis against civilian targets, blamed by U.S. Nazi propagandists on DPR and Russian defenders of the very civilians the Ukrops attacked and murdered.
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Can I prove it? Well, yes I can. Here I am, in front of the exact same apartment building, hit by the Ukrop Nazi missiles. An honest headline would read, “Ukraine Continues Bombardment of Donbas Cities.”

But these Nazi propagandists do not stop at simply blaming their victims for their own crimes, that dirty double-cross is not as low as they can go, not by a long shot. They even, in a trans-Atlantic quadruple-cross conspiracy, connive to discredit truthful reports by adding their own logo to honest news and then announcing to the world that the report is not theirs. Behold…

On April 8, 2022, a Tochka-U ballistic missile (same type used in the University Avenue attack in Donetsk, three weeks before) was fired at the Kramatorsk railway station as four thousand local civilians waited to evacuate the city before fighting broke out.

Some 57 civilians were killed and 109 wounded, in another wanton attack that had no military purpose, but fit hand in glove with the usual false-flag terror attacks for which Ukraine has become well known.
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The proof was and is overwhelming. There is zero doubt that the missile was a Tochka-U and that it came from Ukrainian-held territory. Ukraine continues to use Tochka-U missiles in the Donbas War while the Donbas Republics have none, and Russia retired the last of theirs years ago, in 2019, in favor of the much more effective and accurate Iskander, which Russia has used in Operation Z.

Written on the side of the missile, in Russian, were the words “За Детей,” “For The Kids.” How stupid would someone have to be to believe that the Russians would not only commit a war crime against the ethnic Russian-Ukrainian citizens from the pro-Russian part of Ukraine, but would blatantly add insult to injury and literally implicate themselves before the world by writing something so despicable, in Russian, for the world to see? 
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Furthermore, there are scientific methods of determining the direction a missile came from, including the shape of the crater and where the tail section lands in relation to the warhead. These methods are standard, simple, and used by all militaries around the world. And like the laws of physics, they apply everywhere, and in every situation the same. In the photo below, showing the trajectory of the missile fired at Kramatorsk, everything to the left of the red line is territory under the control of the Ukrainian Army.

For a full listing of all the evidence that proves the missile, S/N Ш91579 was fired by the 19th Ukrainian Missile Brigade, based near Dobropolia, some 45 kilometers from Kramatorsk, see this excellent article by former U.S. Marine officer and UN Weapons Expert Scott Ritter. There are plenty of other articles too, (HERE,  HERE, and HERE) listing the proof and indications that it was a Ukrop false-flag attack on their own civilians. Here are some examples:

1 – The “Smell Test.” WHY would Russians attack ethnic Russian civilians in an area known for its broad support of Russia?

2 – The fake “For The Kids” inscription would be the LAST thing Russians would ever do. Rocket troops are among the most highly trained and disciplined in any army. If the Russians were going to commit a war crime against civilians, do you really think they would sign their work for the world to see?

3 – The physical evidence proves the trajectory of the missile, and that trajectory points directly to Dobropolia, deep inside Ukrainian-held territory, where the 19th Ukrainian Missile Brigade is based. It is impossible for the Russians to have fired a missile from there.

4 – The Russians retired their aged stock of Tochka-U missiles years ago in favor of the Iskander, which they now use.

5 – The Ukrainians still have and use Tochka-U missiles, and have done so on multiple occasions throughout the eight-year Donbas War.

6 – The serial number (S/N) of the Tochka-U fired at Kramatorsk is in the same series and numerically very close to S/Ns of other Tochka-U missiles also known to have been fired by Ukrainian armed forces during the Donbas War.

7 – The exact S/N found on the missile in Kramatorsk was recorded in official documents as having been transferred from the USSR to Ukraine in 1991.

8 – There is zero evidence that would support any theory other than a Ukrainian false-flag attack on the civilians of Kramatorsk. None.

That is a tough nut for the West’s pro-Nazi propagandists to crack. All the evidence proves they did it, beyond any reasonable doubt, and there is no credible evidence of any sort that would support an alternative theory. So what do they do? Simply make things up, of course, as usual, but with a twist. This time, they make up fake news about themselves, and try to palm it off as Russian-produced “disinfo.”

Thus, we see real, first-person, on-the-scene videos of the real aftermath of the Kramatorsk attack, video of the real S/N, all edited together, but with a fake BBC intro and logo added, and then spread all over the internet with the caption, “Look! The BBC finally told the truth for once!!!”

So the professional liars can subsequently “debunk” the fake “BBC video,” along with all the real facts the actual real videos contain. And then literally all Western propaganda outlets smear the story about the fake video all over the web. The search phrase “BBC fake video missile Kramatorsk” brings back 55,000 links on Google, 24 million on Bing, and a whopping 25 million results on Yahoo.

The Western propagandists claim the Russians added the fake BBC logo, but why would Russia discredit real proof of what happened by adding a fake BBC logo. The BBC has a well-earned reputation as one of the most mendacious media outlets in the world; their lies are legion. So why would Russia discredit itself and its own compelling evidence by adding a fake logo of known propagandists? Answer—they didn’t.
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An understanding of the simple fact that modern Western media are the product and descendants of Joseph Goebbels and Ed Bernays is the appropriate foundation for regarding anything Western media presents as fact. Do not expect the BBC to “tell the truth for once;” do not expect paid and pathological liars to tell the truth, even once. Do not expect the leopard to change its spots. Understand they are the enemies of truth and morality, the enemies of Humanity, your enemies, who do everything in their power to deceive and confuse you, in order to enslave you. Respect for the truth is the basis of all morality. Respect and defend it!

The List of Logical Fallacies is also an excellent primer of modern propaganda techniques. But when used by professional liars—intentionally—they are no longer “fallacies” but, rather, lies, attacks on truth and reality, and on human consciousness.
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Fritz Hippler explained the secret of modern propaganda, and he would know. He was the Chief of Filmmaking at the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda during the years of Nazi Germany. As he put it, “The secret of propaganda is to simplify complex or complicated things, to make them as simple as possible, so even less ingenious men can understand what I mean. And then, repeat it, repeat it, repeat it every day. That’s the secret of modern propaganda—simplify and repetition.” (Click on the link: hear and see him say it himself. He’s very convincing.)

2022 marks 100 years since fascism first came into power.(1) At the end of October, 1922, King Victor Emmanuel III ceded the Prime Ministership of Italy to Benito Mussolini, the head of the National Fascist Party, effectively passing political power on to the fascists.

Italian fascism began as a motley nationalist movement, with few definitive left or right features, united only in its support for Italy entering the First World War.

In the aftermath of the war, the fascist movement was shaped as a reaction to the development of a revolutionary left. With industrial workers occupying factories, rural workers rebelling against landowners, and revolutionary socialists vying for leadership of the workers’ movement, Italian capitalists and big landowners struck a deal with the fascisti to serve as a paramilitary assault force– squadristi— against the revolutionary left. The Bolshevik Revolution, as a recent historic social cataclysm, loomed over Italian elites, conjuring their worst nightmare.

Without the conjunction of a successful socialist revolution in a major country, a militant working class inspired by the example, and a ruling class desperate to forestall a Bolshevik-like revolution, Italian fascism might have remained a minor cult, dissipating with the restoration of a stable post-war liberal order.

No doubt the rich and powerful of Italy thought that they could use the fascists for their own purposes. But they were willing to deliver political power to the fascists and allow them to restructure the state for the prize of eliminating the revolutionary threat.

It was this desperate fear of both the reordering of property relations and the destruction of class dominance that created the unique moment in 1922 when fascism went from a movement to a political party to a ruling order.

And it was this historically new fusion of capital and other forms of property with a uniquely modern absolutism, nationalism, and populism that defined Italian fascism after 1922.

Of course, there were ultra-right, ultra-nationalist movements before the rise of fascism.

In France, for example, after the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of the Paris Commune, many French elites sought a restoration of France’s “glory.” The burst of nationalism took many forms: revanchism (or revenge on Germany), anti-Semitism (blaming Jews for the tarnished “glory”), Bonapartism (the demand for a strong leader), and monarchism (the restoration of the monarchy).
The movement to restore an imagined glorious France coalesced around a military leader named Georges Ernest Boulanger, noted for his persistent devotion to going to war with Germany and settling accounts. Boulangisme thrived for a few years, adding elements of populism to its nationalist agenda, even attracting many former leftists.

Superficially, Boulangisme resembles later fascist movements, and a few bourgeois historians see it as such. But it lacked the two vital features that are characteristic of fascism and its time. First, there was no imminent anti-capitalist revolutionary threat posed to the existing order demanding a ruling class reaction. And second, the ruling class perceived no existential danger sufficient to discard republicanism– bourgeois democracy.

In January of 1889, Boulanger’s opportunity arose, but his hesitation and the opposition of most of the ruling class and its agency thwarted a coup.

It is instructive that Boulangisme has gone down in history as a footnote to the nineteenth century.

The Bolshevik revolution and the rise of revolutionary Communist and Workers’ Parties created the conditions for an extremist movement like National Fascism in Italy to be adopted by the Italian ruling class, while the Boulangisme movement is lost to historical obscurity. Reaction becomes fascism only when revolutionary socialism mounts an existential threat to capitalism.

The rise of Nazism fully underscores this dynamic that we came to generically call “fascism.” The rise of ultra-nationalist, revanchist sects led by World War I veterans was commonplace in post-war Germany. The Nazi phenomenon competed successfully in rising above others with its audacity and a significant element of populism captured in its name: national socialism.

As in Italy, the rise of Communism inspired some capitalists, including a group of leading industrialists, to sponsor Nazism’s activity as a hedge against an aroused working class and the prospect of revolution. Until the Great Depression struck Germany, its rulers successfully suppressed the Nazi Party (the party was banned and Hitler imprisoned in its effort to copy Italian fascism’s insurrectionary march on Rome) and the party received less than 3% of the vote in the 1928 federal election.

But the economic downturn stressed the German bourgeois parties that had no answer to the economic collapse, to the ensuing unemployment and worker militancy, and to a Communist Party growing in size and influence.

The Nazi Party, drawing greater support from a desperate ruling class and a déclassé petty bourgeoisie, was seen as a bulwark against revolution. As desperation rose, the bourgeois parties threw their support behind an aging ultra-nationalist former general friendly to Hitler, Erich von Hindenburg, electing him president of the republic.

It was only a matter of time before Hindenburg, no friend of republicanism, would hand the chancellorship to Hitler, following the example of the Italian king.

These two European examples of the rise of ultra-nationalist “saviors” of bourgeois rule constitute the template of classical fascism. Throughout Europe in the inter-war period, other responses to the revolutionary left led to other extreme-right regimes defending the ruling elites against an ascendant workers’ movement. Such rightist movements were led by Bonapartist figures like Mannerheim, Pilsudski, Horthy, Salazar, and Franco. While none follow strictly the route to power or the character of rule of classical fascism, they share the essential feature of defending bourgeois rule against the revolutionary left while disposing of bourgeois democracy to ensure their success.
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Whether one chooses to call Francoism (1939-1975 in Spain) or Pinochetism (1973-1990 in Chile) “fascist” or “quasi-fascist” is a quibble, since they both share with classical fascism the destruction of bourgeois democracy in response to the perceived threat to the capitalist order.

Since the demise of the Soviet Union and the decline or dissolution of mass Communist Parties in most countries, ruling classes have neither sought nor supported the overthrow of bourgeois democracy because of an existential threat from the left. Nonetheless, a broad spectrum of leaders and commentators from right to left have attached the term “fascist” to other political figures or movements. In the extreme, “fascist” or “fascism” has simply become an epithet to demonize an opponent.

More subtly, “fascism” is said to be a right-wing, nationalist, and/or racist movement resembling some of the features of some of the fascist movements of the twentieth century. This approach is especially common with academics, liberals, center-left politicians, or others who refuse to concede the critical place of anti-Bolshevik, anti-Communist ideology at the core of classical fascist thinking and its operational utility in garnering the sponsorship of the bourgeoisie.

Typically, theoreticians– academic and otherwise– develop a checklist of features distilled from a superficial examination of Nazism ripped from its historical context. Chauvinism, political violence, conservative social values, a cult of personality, etc., are all contingent features of historical fascism; but none alone or taken together were incompatible with or absent from the preceding Weimar Republic or other prior historical eras that witnessed the rise of ultra-nationalist movements. It was the fear of revolution and a compliant bourgeois ruling order that served as the necessary elements to bring fascism to power.

Of course, it is important to recognize as extremely dangerous the nostalgia for historical fascism, as exhibited by the American Nazi Party, the National Socialist White Peoples’ Party, and the many other US “Nazi” organizations that have been spun off. In the same way, the current Ukrainian cult around 20th-century fascist Stepan Bandera is extremely dangerous. With the passage of time distancing the Ukrainian people from the sordid history of the OUN and Nazi collaboration, the promotion of ultra-nationalist groups by opportunist politicians and Western interventionists is not only dangerous, but criminal. They will occupy the same place in hell reserved for the US, NATO, and Israeli imperialists that unleashed fanatical, ultra-conservative jihadists on the world.

Misunderstanding fascism, its origins, and its logic can disable the left. Western leftists have drawn lessons– both good and bad– from the united, anti-fascist front adopted by the Communist International in the mid-1930s.
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Communists then understood the nature of fascism, connecting it to the vulnerability of capitalism and its goal: “…to bury Marxism, the revolutionary movement of the working class…”. Led by the veteran anti-fascist Georgi Dimitrov, Communists resolved to put aside differences with other working-class organizations– principally social democracy– to combat the threat from fascism and the growing danger of world war. This became an elastic tactic, expanding to advocate unity with any non-working-class elements who stood staunchly against fascism:

It is clear from this excerpt from Dimitrov’s essay People’s Front that a popular front is broad, indeed. But it is also clear that it is defensive and tactical, meant to stave off the fascist threat.

Yet, Dimitrov also intimates in other passages that the United Front tactic may be a transitional form leading to overthrowing capitalism and a corrective to Communist isolation from the masses.

It was this ambiguity that carried over into the post-World War II era and led many Communist and Workers’ Parties to adopt popular frontism as a strategic approach or as a stage in the transition to socialism. Whether it took the form of an anti-monopoly front or party, a broad labor party, or opportunistically, a “historical compromise” or “Common Program” with bourgeois parties, like the strategy of the self-destructed Italian Communist Party or the now nearly spent French Communist Party, popular frontism became a widely accepted strategy, especially with the Western left. The debate over this strategy continues to this day within the Communist movement.

But it was the application of the united-front tactic against fascism that has proven most problematic since the decline of the social democratic left and the rise of a new fundamentalist right after the economic crisis of the 1970s. In the US and the UK, Reagan and Thatcher were the embodiment of the right turn toward ultra-nationalism, chauvinism, vulgar individualism, deregulation and privatization. Given the gains made by the socialist countries, the victory in Indochina, the growing popularity of socialism in emerging countries, and even a revolution in the West (Portugal), some sensed a “whiff of fascism” in this rightward turn, a right reaction to a growing threat from the left.

After the fall of the Soviet Union– the bulwark of socialism– and the accompanying disarray of the Communist Parties, the rightward turn accelerated, realigning the Western bourgeois political parties. New Democrats, New Labor, New Social Democrats moved farther right to accommodate the rightward turn, rather than fight it.

Rather than rebuilding a vital left around the interests of working people, rather than standing apart from the rightward drift, rather than filling the void left by the capitulation of the tradition center-left, many leftists painted the right as fascist, seemingly justifying laying the socialist project aside and joining with the bourgeois parties in defeating the most extreme elements of the right. The historic left project of defeating capitalism and replacing it with a peoples’ economy was to be deferred until the right (the fascist right!) was dead and buried. This was sold as revisiting the 1930s United Front against Fascism.

With the rise of right-wing populist parties and toxic personalities like Orban, Trump, and Johnson, the “fight against fascism” reached its zenith. Much of the twenty-first-century reshuffled left embraced electoral alliances with bourgeois institutions and political parties against right-wing populism under the banner of uniting against the right. In every case, this strategy helped entrench insipid center-right politicians at a moment of political crisis and growing popular anger and alienation.

This analysis and strategy are wrong on many accounts.

Most importantly, it misrepresents fascism, ripping the ideology from its historical roots founded in a desperate life-and-death struggle with the revolutionary left. Today’s left is far remote from posing an existential challenge to the capitalist system and will remain so if it continues to organize against the phantasm of an imminent fascist threat.

Secondly, the current iteration of bourgeois democracy has been corrupted and drained of democratic content to the extent that while it presents a formidable obstacle to any popular revolutionary surge, it is a well-oiled pathway for the dictates of ensconced ruling classes. That is not to deny that all the bourgeois factions engaged in the electoral game “play” the system to retain power with little regard for the procedural “rules” heralded by bourgeois democratic institutions. It is not necessary to discard bourgeois democracy to thwart change in our corrupted political environment.

Thirdly, the populist right has made no serious effort to create the kind of ideologically-bound squadrista typical of historical fascism. As Diana Johnstone wrote recently in response to the charge that Marine Le Pen, the French right-wing populist, would “confiscate power” and never give it up:

And how would she do that? Her party is not very strong and entirely based on electoral politics. There is no militia organized to use force for political purposes (as in the case of real historic fascists). There are plenty of counter-powers in France, including political parties, hostile media, a largely left-leaning magistrature, the armed forces (linked to NATO), big business and finance which have never supported Le Pen, the entertainment industry, etc., etc.

No one could seriously compare the disorganized, fumbling crew that made an unwelcome visit to the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to the organized, disciplined 30,000 Blackshirts who marched on Rome a hundred years ago.
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The exaggerated “threat of fascism” reflects a lack of confidence that the people of the advanced capitalist countries will embrace true, qualitative, revolutionary changes, that the anti-capitalist left can compete for the loyalty, votes, and actions of working people. Instead of building a bold movement for socialism, the timid, despairing left chooses an unrequited affair with center forces in a quixotic struggle against a far-off, hazy foe.

This is not to minimize the harm that the unrelenting rightward march of the bourgeois parties in the advanced capitalist countries has brought on working people over many decades. But that rightward push must be met in the battleground of ideas with bold, aggressive proposals that go beyond a rear-guard defense; it must advance the interests of working people; and it must provide a vision beyond the resignation that there is no alternative to the tune-up of a bankrupt capitalist system.

If we win working people to such a vision, a day will undoubtedly come when we will truly encounter the ugly face of fascism.

The dreams of Western imperialism after World War II and the ‘end of history’ enigmatic-thesis after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 promised a more general happiness. A tolerant multicultural cosmopolitanism has oppositely led into a transcontinental alliance of imperial ethno-nationalism. Is this not reflecting in the peak of xenophobic, racist, white-supremacist of Euro-Atlantic modernity and recent intensification of NATO and AUKUS-directing process of identity and otherness toward Russia East and China’s south as archaic, ignorant, savage, backward that need to implanted Western democratic civility and free market neoliberal capitalism? – This all serves the goals of accumulation at world scale and empire-building. ​

The question has arisen: is the U.S. a settler colonial country? To begin with, the U.S. definitely was founded as a settler colonial state as well as a capitalist state. The most well-known of states in this classification besides the United States are New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. These present-day capitalist states all started as formations of settler colonialism, which was within the development of early-day imperialism. The age of imperialism is generally considered by some non-Marxist historians as beginning in the 15th century. Others advance a date of around 1760. However, I shall adhere to Lenin’s statement from his celebrated work, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism: “Needless to say, of course, all boundaries in nature and in society are conventional and changeable, and it would be absurd to argue, for example, about the particular year or decade in which imperialism ‘definitely’ became established.”

It would also be “absurd” to argue as to the year or decade that capitalism was established. But the capitalism and imperialism that promoted and was responsible for settler colonialism within present-day U.S. borders did begin in the early 17th century. This of course was not monopoly capitalist imperialism but an early imperialism with many of the features of its early 20th-century counterpart.

Under the imperialist umbrella, what was settler colonialism? First, it was a form of imperialist development. It was the relocation of non-Indigenous people to new territory as permanent settlers. It was the invasion by foreign colonists of Indigenous land with the encroachment authorized by an imperial power and often sponsored by a corporate entity, such as were the Plymouth and Jamestown colonies. In a settler context the objective was commercial, with a search for land and resources to exploit for the benefit of the imperial and business entity. This was expressed by monopoly corporations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when imperialism went into full operation. Imperialism from its incipient stage to its most developed was always in search of new markets.

Settler colonialism preceded the most developed stage of imperialism by over 150 years. Settler colonialism was brutal and barbaric and accompanied by unspeakable atrocities. In this process the Indigenous people were either exterminated or so decimated and isolated as to be reduced to a minority, and the invading settlers became the majority as happened in the U.S. Again, the land was the key resource in this settler colonialism.
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By the early 20th century, settler colonialism had done its “dirty work” in the U.S. by nearly wiping out the Indigenous population. From a pre-contact population estimated at over 60 million the numbers of the Native people had been reduced to 237,196 by 1900.

In his Imperialism, Lenin posited that the era of the most developed imperialism began in the early 20th century, with the combining of finance and industrial capital. This combination of capital resulted in the development of monopoly capitalism. Lenin maintained that this was the final stage of capitalism. Unfortunately, there is no telling how long this final stage will endure.

But before the rise of monopoly capitalist imperialism, settler colonialism was established in many areas of the world. A prime example was the Eastern seaboard of the present-day United States. European settlers had been invading this region for decades before the founding in 1776 of the U.S. as a capitalist state, which then embarked on a 100-year-plus campaign of genocide against the country’s Indigenous peoples.

Everywhere across the globe, settler colonialism from the 18th to the 20th centuries pushed Indigenous peoples to the edge of extinction and oftentimes over the edge. In Brazil settler colonization resulted in the genocide of millions of the Indigenous (this reportedly continues in the modern era in the Amazon region), in Newfoundland the Beothuk were no more by the 1820s, in Australia the Aborigines were hunted like wild game, in California genocidal massacres of tens of thousands of the Indigenous were settler organized and even state sponsored, and in Tasmania the Indigenous population was exterminated.

Settler colonialism is a formation of the past, although colonialism lives on. But its intergenerational legacy still resonates with exploitation and racism. This legacy is being combated in a myriad of struggles, all of which require the highest level of working-class unity for the ultimate and complete victory over these racist vestiges of the past that degrade and limit our future. The white component of the working class are no longer settlers, as settler colonial countries have developed into full-blown imperialist states which must see working-class unity for the transition to socialism.

The U.S. working class is very diverse, but a united proletariat of white and non-white workers is a necessary precondition for the overthrow of capitalism. This working class is the most multinational, multiracial strata of society and the most strategic layer capable of fostering revolutionary change. Also, this unity depends on substantial numbers of white workers joining in the struggle that will realize the transition to socialism.

In the book Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, J. Sakai states that “the white proletariat cannot be revolutionary because they are settlers.” This statement reveals the author’s bias against working-class unity and plays into the hands of the ruling class. White workers are obviously not settlers but a part of the working class and natural allies of the nationally and racially oppressed. To regard them as “settlers” would be a blow against the struggle for unity and would only prolong capitalism.

As for Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior, and Sharice Davids, U.S. Representative from Kansas, their involvement in the government should be celebrated because the more progressive Indigenous voices to be heard the better. But working for the government can result in being in an awkward position, as with Haaland’s supporting Biden’s decision to sell new oil and gas leases. Haaland’s predicament had already been foreseen by many in Indian Country who realized that she would be hamstrung on certain decisions. Unfortunately, if she wants to keep her Cabinet position, acquiescence to wrong decisions is required.

As for decolonization as advocated by Indigenous activists, this concept is a legitimate expression of the struggle for Indigenous liberation. Decolonization is represented by the LandBack movement of Native American people.
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In reference to the overall Indigenous approach to the Biden administration, I would characterize it as one of employing mass pressure, taking into account Biden’s flip-flops (again referencing his about-face on gas and oil) and foreign policy initiatives (his inflaming the Ukrainian conflict by a massive influx of weaponry). Mass pressure on Biden is required to get the most done. A good example is the Leonard Peltier campaign. To get the most done for Peltier, a march is being organized for his freedom that will begin in Minneapolis on September 1 and culminate on November 22, in Washington, D.C. So far, the mass pressure approach must be brought to bear on Biden to get results.

The United States is hosting a Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, California, on June 6 – 10 to “focus on ’Building a Sustainable, Resilient, and Equitable Future’ for our hemisphere.” The irony of the US-hosted event could not be more in your face: in terms of sustainability, the US is the second largest CO2 emitter, with its pentagon alone ranking as the “world's 55th largest emitter;” in terms of inequality, in the US the “top 0.1 percent hold roughly the same share of our wealth as our bottom 90 percent;” and in terms of providing an ‘equitable future for the hemisphere,’ the US’s continued Monroe doctrine treatment of Latin America as “its own colonial territory,” where it has waged criminal regime change operations for over a century to protect its imperialist sphere of influence, would place it as the last country in the region with the right to talk about an equitable future for the hemisphere.

Nonetheless, the irony of the event is intensified by the US’s exclusion of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Apparently, besides blockades, covert terroristic campaigns, and the creation and funding of ‘dissident groups,’ part of the punishment nations face when they prevent US monopolies from owning their counties’ resources or superexploiting their people’s labor power, is also an expulsion from the geographical region their country is in. Like the British colonial ordinance surveys in Ireland, geography itself becomes a tool in the hands of imperialists; the US sees itself capable of determining who is, and who is not, American.

Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) threatened to personally boycott the event if Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua are excluded. He affirmed on May 10th that "If they exclude, if not all are invited, a representative of the Mexican government is going to go, but I would not."

Since AMLO’s statement was made, Bolivia, Honduras, and The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) have joined in protest against the exclusion. Bolivian president Luis Arce said that “If the exclusion of our brother peoples persists, I will not participate in it.” Similarly, Honduras’ Xiomara Castro said that “If all our nations are not there, it’s not a summit of the Americas.”
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As Fidel Castro once told Salvador Allende in their late 1971 meeting, "This continent has in its belly a creature called Revolution, which is on the way and that inexorably, by biological law, by social law, by the law of history has to be born. And it will be born one way or another." In the context of a returned socialist tide in the region, of the inclusion of various Latin American countries into China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and lastly, of the continued collective rejection of US imperialist narratives and exclusionary events, the grounds are being laid for a sovereign and united patria grande, a condition which is essential for the region’s birthing of the ‘creature called revolution.’ 

​The contemporary neoliberal system is fundamentally unjust. It is filled with blood-sucking billionaires whose entire existence of grotesque opulence is structurally predicated on the continual exploitation of the working class – a powerful force in whose hands lie the productive powers of humanity. Through the wretched brutalization of labor, the rich enact a process of capital accumulation whose end result is the fattening of bourgeois pockets at one pole and the growth of dehumanization and social murder at the other. While one group of people lives in an oasis of wasteful abundance and sadistically revels in the elitist social status signified by this unnatural wealth, the other group is left to die in diseased conditions, forced to live a life of unjustified toil in the slums and ghettos of abject poverty. This situation is justified through the legal sanctification of private property, through the acceptance of crude selfishness, and through the normative establishment of the right to oppress others in the name of personal liberty. The sheer cruelty of this state of affairs is bound to elicit resistance from the proletariat, whose living conditions of neo-slavery leave him/her with no other option than to revolt against the denial of basic necessities. To manage these counter-hegemonic threats, today’s billionaires have consolidated a militarist apparatus of repression, embodied in the state’s increasing use of its monopoly over violence and the expansion of the carceral system. The rebelliousness of the surplus population, or the reserve army of labor, generated by neoliberal dynamics of fiscal conservatism and privatization is kept in control through the regular deployment of violence, which weakens the militancy of subalterns and convinces them of their disposability. Thus, the glittering world of commodities and billionaire personalities inevitably entails its dark underside: the constantly enforced exclusion of the poor from the material world created by their own hands and the protection of bourgeois control over the means of production from the democratizing tendencies unleashed by the collective subjectivity of the proletariat.

Taking into account the stark inequalities that dominate the general landscape of late-stage monopoly capitalism, one can draw only the following conclusion: eat the rich. Neoliberalism only displays in a more unadorned fashion the primary contradiction that has characterized capitalism from the beginning, namely the contradiction between social production and private property. Capital, or the logic of the endless self-expansion of money, results in the organization of all the forces of production into one effectively organized social process. This socializing tendency is facilitated by the centralization of capital i.e. the expropriation of many capitalists by few. In the words of Karl Marx, the progressive advancement of this centralizing tendency develops “the cooperative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime.”

However, the immense productivity of capitalism is constricted by the suffocating narrowness of private property. Capital is profit-seeking and can’t exist without the inherent drive toward the maximization of surplus-value. This drive manifests itself through the control of the production process with the help of which private capital appropriates the most of the wealth produced through the socialized methods of production, with little share to the actual producers. In this way, the control of capital over the production process prevents the flourishing of the creativity inherent in human labour; the need to extract surplus value means that the rigidities of top-down control and mechanical conformity create relations of production that are in conflict with the liberating potential of the productive forces. That’s why Marx notes: “Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”

The presence of systemic contradictions does not, however, spell the automatic death of capitalism. These contradictory tendencies need to be accelerated by the construction of subjective dispositions that kindle the fire of working class militancy and weaken the legitimacy of the bourgeoisie. In the words of Georges Sorel: “The spirit of class struggle does not arise mechanically from conflicts over salary; experience teaches us that these conflicts can be resolved in a way conducive to social peace and inspiring solidarity between classes. In order to produce and, above all, to maintain the spirit of separation it is necessary to have institutions capable of generating and developing it.” Class hatred toward the bourgeoisie plays an important role in giving political velocity to the economic movements of class struggle. Through hatred, the proletariat shuns the illusions of symbolic unity promoted by the instrumental philanthropy and feigned generosity of the ruling class. It comes to accept as a basic fact the irreconcilability of the interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Instead of looking upon the ruling class with admiration and envy and aspiring to imbibe their elitist attitudes, the working class regards the bourgeois civilization with angry contempt.

This represents the political delineation of the proletarian identity, the reduction of class battle to a pure and primitive antagonism between two definitively demarcated class identities, and the conversion of the collection of individual labour-powers into a social mass, a unified mass worker. Recognizing the usefulness of this destructive power of class hatred, Antonio Negri comments: “The hatred for the despotic power that dead labor [labor as embodied in machines and other commodities] tries increasingly to exercise over living labor [the human capacities denoted by laborers] – this hatred, even if it is shot through with pessimism, exercises a function which, if not creative, plays a certain maieutic role. It is a basis, a fundamental “rip” in the “lining of History,” in the “sediment of the Institution”, or in the “artifice of the Law.”” The historical content of class hatred is supplied by the politically organized remembrance of the existential degradation wrought by capitalism upon the social body of workers. Talking about the deficits that prevented German Social Democracy from pre-empting the rise of Nazism, Walter Benjamin remarks that the organization “thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”

​In other words, what was lacking in the social democrats’ futurist vision of socialist utopia was the absolute negativity of capitalism. According to Benjamin, the transition from capitalism to socialism should not be conceived of as “the progressive unfolding of something already promised – liberated grandchildren whose lives will enjoy full human vitality” – but should involve “the deepening of opposition to the existing order, strengthening the proletarian resolve to abolish (negate) capitalist society.” A communist plan can’t just look forward; it has to look backward for reasons why revolutionary changes might be necessary. Breaking this linkage between the transcendence of overcoming and the immanent facticity of oppression destroys the emotional foundations of class hatred. In fact, proletarian hatred itself is based on the opposition to the bourgeoisie’s abstract futurism, which has sacrificed present lives in the name of an ill-defined notion of progress. This image of a promised capitalist heaven needs to be smashed by the historical memory of the working class. And this ponderous past needs to be lightened by the political will of revolutionary hatred, by the declaration of an unrelenting war against the bourgeoisie. Only this orientation can help us advance in terms of socialist theory and practice. As Mario Tronti writes: “The first step continues to be the recuperation of an irreducible working-class partiality against the entire social system of capital. Nothing will be done without class hatred: neither the elaboration of theory, nor practical organization. Only from a rigorously working-class viewpoint will the total movement of capitalist production be comprehended and utilized as a particular moment of the workers’ revolution. Only one-sidedness, in science and in struggle, opens the way simultaneously to the understanding of everything and to its destruction. Any attempt to assume the general interest, every temptation to remain at the level of social science, will only serve to inscribe the working class—in the most powerful way possible—within the development of capital.”