Hans Sanderson, Michał Czub, Sven Koschinski et al. Environmental impact of sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, 10 February 2023, PREPRINT (Version 1) available at Research Square [https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-2564820/v1]

Hernandez, America. "Why Cheap US Gas Costs a Fortune in Europe." Politico, 15 Nov. 2022, www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.eu/article/cheap-us-gas-cost-fortune-europe-russia-ukraine-energy/amp/.

​"Text - S.1441 - 116th Congress (2019-2020): Protecting Europe’s Energy Security Act of 2019." Congress.gov, Library of Congress, 31 July 2019, https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/1441/text.

Renshaw, Jarrett, and Nina Chestney. "U.S., EU Strike LNG Deal As Europe Seeks to Cut Russian Gas." Reuters, 25 Feb. 2022, seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream.

Shalal, Andrea , et al. "Biden Pledges End to Nord Stream 2 If Russia Invades Ukraine." Reuters, 8 Feb. 2022, www.reuters.com/world/biden-germanys-scholz-stress-unified-front-against-any-russian-aggression-toward-2022-02-07/.

Ganz, Jared. "Swedish Say They Found Evidence of Explosives in Nord Stream Pipelines." The Hill, 18 Nov. 2022, thehill.com/policy/international/3742163-swedish-say-they-found-evidence-of-explosives-in-nord-stream-pipelines/amp/.

Duffy, Kate. "The CIA Warned Germany Weeks Ago about a Possible Attack on the Nord Stream Natural-gas Pipelines, Report Says." Business Insider, 28 Sept. 2022, www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/cia-warned-germany-attacks-nord-stream-pipelines-leak-sabotage-report-2022-9%3famp.

Alkousaa, Riham. "CIA Warned Berlin about Possible Attacks on Gas Pipelines in Summer - Spiegel." Reuters, 27 Sept. 2022, www.reuters.com/world/cia-warned-berlin-about-possible-attacks-gas-pipelines-summer-spiegel-2022-09-27/.

Xiaoming, Zhou . "If the US Is Not behind Nord Stream Explosions, It Should Have No Reason to Block a UN Investigation." South China Morning Post, 3 Mar. 2023, www.google.com/amp/s/amp.scmp.com/comment/opinion/world/article/3211959/if-us-not-behind-nord-stream-explosions-it-should-have-no-reason-block-un-investigation.

Kasprak, Alex. "Alex Kasprak." Snopes, 10 Feb. 2023, www.snopes.com/news/2023/02/10/hersh-nord-stream-sabotage/.

Renshaw, Jarrett, and Nina Chestney. "U.S., EU Strike LNG Deal As Europe Seeks to Cut Russian Gas." Reuters, 25 Feb. 2022, seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream.

Hernandez, America. "Why Cheap US Gas Costs a Fortune in Europe." Politico, 15 Nov. 2022, www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.eu/article/cheap-us-gas-cost-fortune-europe-russia-ukraine-energy/amp/.

Benshoff, Laura. "The Nord Stream Pipelines Have Stopped Leaking. But the Methane Emitted Broke Records." NPR, 4 Oct. 2022, www.npr.org/2022/10/04/1126562195/the-nord-stream-pipelines-have-stopped-leaking-but-the-methane-emitted-broke-rec.

MATHIESEN, KARL, and ZIA WEISE. "8 Things to Know about the Environmental Impact of ‘Unprecedented’ Nord Stream Leaks." Politico, 28 Sept. 2022, www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.eu/article/8-thing-know-environmental-impact-unprecedented-nord-stream-leak/amp/.

Svantesson, Sara. "EMISSIONS OF GREENHOUSE GASES." Danmarks Statistik, 4 Oct. 2022, www.dst.dk/da/Statistik/temaer/klima#:~:text=I%202021%20udledte%20vi%2044,indbygger%20i%20Danmark.

​Hans Sanderson, Michał Czub, Sven Koschinski et al. Environmental impact of sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, 10 February 2023, PREPRINT (Version 1) available at Research Square [https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-2564820/v1]

The president of China, Xi Jinping, called for accelerating the development of science and technology to ensure greater self-sufficiency and strengthen the country’s army in the face of the unprecedented siege that the United States has been applying, circumstances that require adapting to new challenges.

In the context of the 14th National People’s Congress, from where the destiny of the country is decided and in which Xi was re-elected for his third presidential term, he said that Beijing must apply the new philosophy of strengthening all fronts, and intensify efforts to create a new pattern of growth.

​“China must ultimately rely on scientific and technological innovation,” Xi said.

He also spoke about the need to shield China from a military and technological point of view. He spoke of turning the armed forces into a “great iron wall” that effectively safeguards national sovereignty, security, and development interests.

Regarding this last item, we must mention the strategic importance of Taiwan and the support of the United States for its false autonomy. Regarding gringo interference, he warned that China remains determined to prevent outside agents from getting involved in separatist activities on the island.

​In relation to the economic dimension, he asked officials to promote the construction of a new growth framework that prioritizes domestic demand, innovation, and self-sufficiency in science and technology, in addition to improving the industrial sector and promoting innovation to reduce carbon emissions.

After being re-elected for his third term as president of the National Popular Assembly, this body elected him as president of the Central Military Commission (CMC), and made him the commander of the two million-member People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

This is a transcript from Noah’s presentation at the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation’s Symposium on W. E. B. Du Bois. You can see Noah’s presentation HERE.​

Videos circulated all over the internet of the brutality that occured between demonstrators and riot police.​

About 26 arrests were made and over 4,000 others were stopped and searched in today's protests that engulfed France over President Emmanuel Macron's controversial pension reform. 

France's Ministry of the Interior reported that over 368,000 protesters rallied across France today to demonstrate against a reform intended to raise the retirement age to 64.

Demonstrations began at 10 am (0900 GMT) in major cities such as Toulouse and Nice. The march in Paris kicked off at 2 pm. Videos circulated all over the internet of the brutality that occurred between demonstrators and riot police.

The police said that about 48,000 rallied in Paris alone when the CGT estimated that 300,000 have taken the street. 

On Tuesday, the CGT said that 700,000 took the streets in Paris, when about 1.28 million people demonstrated nationwide, the greatest attendance since the protest movement's inception.

According to government data, 1.28 million people demonstrated on Tuesday, the greatest attendance since the protest movement's inception. Unions put the figure at 3.5 million individuals.

The majority of voters oppose Macron's plan, while a narrow majority favors the strike measures, as per opinion polls.

Concurrently, TotalEnergies (TTEF.PA) confirmed that strikes continue across the oil major's French refineries and depots, while SNCF said national and regional services would be severely impacted throughout the weekend, as per Reuters.

Garbage continues to pile up on the streets of Paris, with locals reporting an increase in the number of rats, as per local media.
​
If the committee agrees on a text, a final vote in both houses is probable, but the fate of such a vote in the lower house of Parliament, where Macron's party has a relative majority, remains questionable.
​
On March 15, there will be another day of nationwide strikes and protests.

This article was republished from Almayadeen.

Speaking to Peoples Dispatch from his hideout, the 21-year-old narrated how he escaped from the police and made it to safety with the help of his comrades, following hours of torture, after being shot by the King’s police while leading a pro-democracy protest

"I am well and safe," Mvuselelo Mkhabela says in a recorded statement. Photo: CPS Swaziland (via Facebook)

Mvuselelo Mkhabela, 21-year-old activist of the Communist Party of Swaziland (CPS), confirmed that he was safe in a video message on March 9, over a week since his escape from the hospital where he was brought by the police after being shot and tortured by them.

Security forces of King Mswati III, Africa’s last absolute monarch, shot Mvuselelo on February 28 while he was leading a local protest to disrupt a government campaign aimed at convincing people to vote in the upcoming parliamentary election, expected to be held in the second half of 2023.

Only those individuals approved by the King’s local chiefs—who also control the community land and resources—can contest the elections to the parliament of the southern African kingdom, where all political parties have been banned since 1973.

Describing the parliament as the King’s “puppet,” with no power to hold to account the executive directly appointed by the monarch, CPS International Secretary Pius Vilakati told Peoples Dispatch that these elections “have nothing to do with the interests of the people of Swaziland.” Held every five years, they only serve to legitimize the monarchy, he said, justifying the CPS’ campaign to disrupt the election.

Pius argued that the election can “neither be free nor fair,” when the chiefs who decide who can and cannot contest the elections also control community members’ access to land, which in Swaziland is all owned by the King.

Nevertheless, determined to get people to vote and counter the campaign for boycott, the government has launched its own propaganda campaign to convince communities about the virtues of this election.

Agents of what is called the “Elections and Boundaries Committee” arrived on the morning of February 28 to campaign in Mvuselo’s small town of Hluti, in the Hosea constituency in Shiselweni region, about 180 kilometers south of Swaziland’s capital Mbabane.
​
Along with 25-year-old Bongi Mamba, another CPS activist, Mvuselelo had been organizing this rural community and campaigning to raise awareness about the need to boycott and disrupt the elections.

On February 7, heavily armed policemen barged into Mvuselelo’s home at 4 am and arrested the duo, two days after they had led a local anti-monarchist protest calling to lift the ban on political parties and release political prisoners.

They were tortured and interrogated in custody before being released the next day, after Hosea community members protested outside the station. Bongi was released without any charge, but Mvuselelo was released on bail and charged with burning property and possessing cannabis seeds.

On their release, they were briefly hospitalized. Unfazed, the duo went right back to Hosea, and continued organizing the community and campaigning against participation in this election.

​When the agents of the election committee arrived with police on February 28, youngsters in the area led by Mvuselelo quickly mobilized to stop them from entering the community. Carrying banners proclaiming ‘No to Mswati Election,’ ‘Democracy Now!,’ ‘Mswati Must Fall!,’‘Unban political parties,’ and ‘Free all political prisoners’, they blocked the small mud-road, stomping their feet in a rhythmic dance and chanting in chorus a protest song against Mswati.

“Without any warning, the police who were accompanying the election agents shot me in the right thigh from a close range. The bullet missed my bone and exited from the other side,” Mvuselelo told Peoples Dispatch while speaking from a hideout where he is being treated by a doctor who is also a CPS member.

“Other community members tried to fight back. Some even tried to grab their guns to stop them from shooting more people. But they fired several rounds. When people ran for cover, the police picked me up and threw me in one of the vans they had brought.” The seats and floor of the van had already been covered by plastic sheets to prevent blood stains, he said, concluding that the police had come with the intention to shoot and arrest protesters.

“They drove past the nearby community clinic, but did not stop to get me first aid. They did not even call an ambulance. Instead they intentionally took a long gravel road and drove for almost 40 kilometers to cause me more injuries,” Mvuselelo said.

“All the way they beat me, and fingered my bullet wound to cause more pain and bleeding. They threatened me, saying this is only the start, there are worse things they were going to do to me.”

When the van stopped, it was not at a hospital but at the Hlathikhulu police station, where he was profiled, interrogated, and further tortured. “They were trying to pin some false cases on me to justify what they had done,” he recollected. “It must have been two or three hours after I was shot that they finally took me to a hospital,” sometime between 3 and 4 pm.

But hospitals in Swaziland have been under-equipped, under-staffed, and running short of even basic medicines from well before the COVID pandemic. Healthcare, like education, is chronically underfunded by the monarch, who controls much of Swaziland’s economy and splurges the national wealth on his palaces, extravagant parties, a fleet of Rolls Royce cars, private jets, and other luxuries, while 70% of his subjects live in poverty.

“I had to wait for more than 40 minutes after reaching the hospital to be attended by a doctor and nurse,” Mvuselelo said, adding that he could not, however, blame them. Severely understaffed, the overburdened medics were doing their best, struggling to treat patients with the few resources at their disposal, he explained.

“But they did not have the medicines needed for my treatment. So they only gave a painkiller injection, bandaged my wound, and admitted me for the night,” he said. “Even while the nurse was cleaning my wound, the police continued to question me. I realized they were going to frame me with some serious false charges.”

That evening, as Mvuselelo was lying on the hospital bed in a daze after having lost blood for hours, thinking of all his comrades killed by police, the police had briefly dropped their guard, apparently confident that he couldn’t escape with the hole in his thigh.

Taking advantage, he said, “a party comrade snuck into my hospital ward with clean clothes around 7:30 in the evening.” Changing out of his blood-stained clothes and concealing his bullet wound under the clean pair of trousers, Mvuselelo set out of the ward, limping with his comrade’s support, counting on his change of clothes as a disguise.

“We made it out of the hospital quickly, but I had to sit down on the road every now and then, because my leg was extremely painful. But I could not sit for long. Police vehicles were patrolling the main road,” he said.

After making a dash across the road to the bush, he says he slowly limped through the forest in the dark, leaning on his comrade’s shoulder for support as the duo made it to a homestead a kilometer away, from where another member of the party picked him up after dinner and drove him out of the area.

“There are many doctors and other unionized professionals in our party,” he explained, while saying that the very next morning a doctor came with the needed medicines to treat him secretly in his hideout.

Mvuselelo is recovering fast, but still needs support to walk. The police remain on the lookout for him. On March 3, they visited his home and questioned his father about his whereabouts. Mvuselelo says he must soon flee the country. Most political dissidents pursued by the monarchy end up in exile, mostly in South Africa, after going underground. Others have been assassinated or imprisoned on charges of terrorism.

“We are facing trying times in our country. But we need to be strong and fight against this inhumane system,” an unfazed Mvuselelo said in the video message shot from his hideout and published on the CPS social media page on Thursday, March 9.

Wearing a red t-shirt with the hammer and sickle insignia, and speaking with a banner of the banned party in his backdrop, he insisted, “As youth, it is our task to ensure we throw ourselves into the struggle… We must not spare ourselves… Let us organize ourselves in schools, colleges, universities, workplaces, the trade union movement, etc.”

But inside this defiant communist, risking his life, limbs, and liberty for the cause of a democratic Swaziland, there is also a 21-year-old student, deeply worried about the uncertain future of his education. “I had just completed my school. My results were out only last week. I was preparing to apply for universities and scholarships, but how can I do it now with the police after me?” he asked.

“I wanted to study civil engineering so that I could help build houses for my community members who don’t have houses to live in. But now I might have to forget about this dream,” he said, giving out a chuckle that was perceptibly hollow with sadness.

“But then again,” he countered himself after his voice had momentarily faded away into silent thought, “I might not not have been able to study anyway, even without all this police trouble. Because the regime is taking away the scholarships. So for those of us without money, it is very difficult to get into a university. Even if we do, they have stopped paying allowances, so you need to have money to pay for food and stay. Most students don’t have enough money. They never make it through their course for four years.”
​
“So you see,” he reasoned, “I have no choice but to struggle against the monarchy. Because my dream as a student can only be fulfilled hand-in-hand with the dream of a better Swaziland where people hold the power and wealth, not the King.”

Ten years since his passing, the legacy of Commander Hugo Chávez lives on in the people of Venezuela and the world

​“I am Chávez” t-shirt. Photo: Zoe Alexandra

​“I am a young Chavista”. Photo: Zoe Alexandra

​Musicians participate in the march to the 4F Mausoleum where Chávez’s remains were laid to rest. The development of national arts and culture has been put front and center in the Bolivarian Revolution. Photo: Zoe Alexandra

There is little that unites me with those who occupied the Capitol building on Jan. 6. Their vision for America, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, blind support for Trump and embrace of reactionary fact-free conspiracy theories leaves a very wide chasm between their beliefs and mine. But that does not mean I support the judicial lynching against many of those who participated in the Jan. 6 events, a lynching that is mandating years in pretrial detention and prison for misdemeanors. Once rights become privileges, none of us are safe. 

The U.S. legal system has a very sordid history. It was used to enforce segregation and legitimize the reign of terror against Black people. It was the hammer that broke the back of militant union movements. It persecuted radicals and reformers in the name of anti-communism. After 9/11, it relentlessly went after Muslim leaders and activists with Special Administrative Measures (SAMs). SAMs, established by the Clinton administration, originally only applied to people who ordered murders from prison or were convicted of mass murder, but are now used to isolate all manner of detainees before and during trial. They severely restrict a prisoner’s communication with the outside world; prohibiting calls, letters and visits with anyone except attorneys and sharply limit contact with family members. The solitary confinement like conditions associated with SAMs undermine any meaningful right to a fair trial according to analysis by groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights and can amount to tortureaccording to the United Nations. Julian Assange faces SAMs or similar conditions should he be extradited to the U.S. The Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA, begun under the Reagan administration, also allows evidence in a trial to be classified and withheld from defendants. The courts, throughout American history, have abjectly served the interests of big business and the billionaire class. The current Supreme Court is one of the most retrograde in decades, rolling back legal protections for vulnerable groups and denying workers protection from predatory corporate abuse.

At least 1,003 people have been arrested and charged so far for participation in events on Jan. 6, with 476 pleading guilty, in what has been the largest single criminal investigation in U.S. history, according to analysis by Business Insider. The charges and sentences vary, with many receiving misdemeanor sentences such as fines, probation, a few months in prison or a combination of the three. Of the 394 federal defendants who have had their cases adjudicated and sentenced as of Feb. 6, approximately 220 “have been sentenced to periods of incarceration” with a further 100 defendants “sentenced to a period of home detention, including approximately 15 who also were sentenced to a period of incarceration,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C. There are six convictions and four guilty pleas on charges of “seditious conspiracy.” This offense is so widely defined that it includes conspiring to levy war against the government on the one hand and delaying the execution of any law on the other. Those charged and convicted of “seditious conspiracy” were accused of collaborating to oppose “the lawful transfer of presidential power by force” by preventing or delaying the Certification of the Electoral College vote. While a few of the organizers of the Jan. 6 protest such as Stewart Rhodes, who founded Oath Keepers, may conceivably be guilty of sedition, and even this is in doubt, the vast majority of those caught up in the incursion of the Capitol did not commit serious crimes, engage in violence or know what they would do in Washington other than protest the election results. 

Joseph D. McBride went to law school because his brother was serving a 15-year sentence for a crime he did not commit. He provided free legal advice as a law school student to those encamped in Zuccotti Park in New York City during the Occupy movement. Following law school, he worked as a public defender and in the Legal Aid Society. He represents several of those charged in the Jan. 6 incursion, includingRichard Barnett. Barnett was photographed in Nancy Pelosi’s office with his leg propped up on her desk. Barnett was convicted by a federal jury, which deliberated for two hours, on eight counts, including disorderly conduct in the Capitol building. He faces up to 47 years in prison. He is scheduled to be sentenced on May 3.

“The post 9/11 model is being applied to American citizens,” McBride told me when I reached him by phone. “That model is the 19 hijackers. Everyone who is a religious Muslim is a suspect for the next 20 years. They should be waterboarded. They should be put in fucking jail and left in Guantanamo Bay. Lock them up. Throw away the key. Because they are psychopath extremists who believe in Allah and we don’t have time for that. They’re a threat based on who they are, what they look like, what they believe in. When the truth is, the vast majority of these guys don’t do drugs, don’t drink alcohol, they have five kids and they live pretty good lives. But because of the label of ‘terrorism’ and ‘Osama Bin Laden’ and ‘al-Qaeda’, everybody who is a Muslim is now a target. If we get on a plane next to one of these people, we get nervous about it because that’s how much it’s ingrained in us. The same thing is happening, except it’s being applied to a new group of people, primarily white Christians, Trump supporters, for now.” 

“Power is going to change hands,” he warned. “The Democrats are not going to be in power forever. When power changes hands, that precedent is going to travel with it. If somebody else from the other side gets in and starts to target the people who are in power now, their families, their businesses, their lives, their freedom, then it’s over. America goes from being a free democracy to a tribalist partisan state. Maybe there’s not ethnic-cleansing in the streets, but people are cleansing each other from the workplace, from social media, from the banking system and they’re putting people in jail. That’s where we’re headed. I don’t know why people can’t see what’s on the horizon.”

The Jan. 6 protestors were not the first to occupy Congressional offices, including Nancy Pelosi’s office. Young environmental activists from the Sunrise Movement, anti-war activists from Code Pink and even congressional staffers have engaged in numerous occupations of congressional offices and interrupted congressionalhearings. What will happen to groups such as Code Pink if they occupy congressional offices with Republicans in control of the White House, the Congress and the courts? Will they be held for years in pretrial detention? Will they be given lengthy prison terms based on dubious interpretations of the law? Will they be considered domestic terrorists? Will protests and civil disobedience become impossible?

McBride said those who walked to the Capitol were not aware that the Department of Justice had created arbitrary markers, what McBride called an “imaginary red line that they draw around the Capitol grounds.” Anyone who crossed that invisible line was charged with violating Capitol grounds.

He railed against the negative portrayal of the protestors in the media, the White House and Democratic Party leadership, as well as a tainted jury pool in Washington composed of people who have close links to the federal government. He said Change of Venue motions filed by the defense lawyers have been denied.

“The D.C. jury pool is poisoned beyond repair,” McBride said. “When you just look at what the January 6  Committee did alone, never mind President Biden’s speeches about ‘insurrectionists,’ ‘MAGA Republican extremists’ and all this stuff, and if you just consider the fact that D.C. is very small, that people who work in the Federal Government are all by definition, kind of victims of January 6 and what happened that day, their institutions and colleagues were ‘under attack.’ How can anybody from that town serve on a jury pool? They can’t. The bias is astounding.”

Jacob Chansley, the so-called “QAnon shaman” who was adorned on Jan. 6 in red, white and blue face paint, carried an American flag on a spear-tipped pole and wore a coyote-fur and horned headdress, pleaded guilty to obstruction. He was sentenced to more than three years in prison. Chansley, who says he is a practitioner of ahimsa, an ancient Indian principle of non-violence toward all living beings, was not accused of assaulting anyone. He was diagnosed in prison with transient schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety. 

Guy Wesley Reffitt, who did not enter the Capitol building, nevertheless was sentenced after three hours of deliberations to seven years and three months in prison on five charges, including “two counts of civil disorder, and one count each of obstruction of an official proceeding, entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds with a firearm, and obstruction of justice.” His obstruction of justice charge came from “threatening” his two teenage children to prevent them from reporting him to law enforcement.

Daniel Ray Caldwell, a Marine Corps veteran, who sprayed a chemical irritant at a group of police officers outside the Capitol and entered through the Senate Wing doors where he remained inside for approximately two minutes, was sentenced to more than five years in prison. He spent, like many who have been charged, nearly two years in pretrial detention.

Even the charges against Rhodes, who faces 20 years in prison, and other militia leaders of groups such as the Proud Boys are problematic. The New York Times reported that, “despite the vast amount of evidence the government collected in the case — including more than 500,000 encrypted text messages — investigators never found a smoking gun that conclusively showed the Proud Boys plotted to help President Donald J. Trump remain in office.” The government has relied on the testimony of a former Proud Boy, Jeremy Bertino, who is cooperating with prosecutors to build an “inferential case” against Enrique Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola, the five defendants in the current Proud Boy case. Bertino, on cross-examination, admitted that in previous interviews with the government, he repeatedly told investigators that the Proud Boys did not have an explicit plan to halt the election certification and that he did not anticipate acts of violence on Jan. 6. The FBI had as many as eight informants in the Proud Boys that included its leader, Enrique Tarrio, during the storming of the Capitol, raising the very real possibility of entrapment.

“They’re changing the laws,” McBride said. “Look at the 1512 charge, the obstruction charge. That was used for document shredding in Enron. It has no applicability to Jan. 6 whatsoever. They took it. They repurposed it. They weaponised it against these people and made it impossible for them to defend themselves. When you look at the civil disorder charge, they are saying that if January 6 was one big civil disorder, and if you had any type of interaction with a police officer that day that may or may not have caused the police officer to step away from his duties for a moment, you can go down with civil disorder and get five years in jail.”

Ryan Nichols, a Marine Corps veteran, is living under house arrest in Texas after nearly two years in pretrial detention, much of it in solitary confinement, in Washington, D.C and Virginia jails. He faces five felony and three misdemeanor charges. Prosecutors say Nichols assaulted officers and obstructed an official proceeding. He has been ordered to “stay away from Washington, D.C.” except for business related to his case, according to court documents. He has had to submit to “location monitoring technology” and is denied access to the internet and his phone except to perform functions related to his case. He cannot have contact with anyone involved in the Jan. 6 events, including co-defendants. Nichols must remain in his home 24 hours a day except for medical and court appointments. He is permitted to attend Sunday church services at Mobberly Baptist Church in Longview, Texas. He is facing 20 years in prison. He is scheduled to go to trial on March 27.

I spoke with Bonnie Nichols, Ryan’s wife, by phone from their home in Longview, Texas. 

Ryan was arrested on Jan. 18, 2020. The FBI surrounded their house at 5:30 am in armored vehicles. They unscrewed the bulbs from flood lights and cut the wires to the couple’s security cameras before kicking in the front door. The couple and their two children, then aged 4 and 6, were at Bonnie’s parents house during the raid. The FBI confiscated their weapons, electronics and documents, including Social Security cards. 

“We wanted to cooperate,” she said. “We didn’t know anything was wrong. They asked Ryan to come in for questioning. Ryan went and turned himself in. They arrested him and I didn’t see him again for over a year and a half.”

Ryan, who had no criminal record, ran a nonprofit called Rescue the Universe where he carried out search-and-rescue operations after natural disasters. He was denied bail. He was sent to a holding facility in Grady County Oklahoma for two months before being flown to Washington, D.C. where he was met by some two dozen U.S. Marshals. His feet were shackled. His arms were shackled to a chain around his waist. He was placed in long term solitary confinement and denied video calls or visitation from his family, including his children. He was denied access to his trial documents for nearly a year and prohibited from attending religious services in the jail.

Ryan, whose most serious offense appears to be incendiary rhetoric calling for a “second American revolution,” spent nearly 22 months in solitary confinement. Depressed, struggling to cope with the physical and psychological strain of prolonged isolation, he was eventually placed on suicide watch. He was strapped to a bench in a room where a light was never turned off. Guards would periodically shout through a window “Do you feel like killing yourself?” Those on suicide watch who said  “yes” remained strapped to the bench. Those who said “no” were sent back to their cells. Ryan was often prohibited from having nail clippers — the guards told him he could chew his toenails down — or getting a haircut unless he agreed to be vaccinated for COVID-19. When Ryan appeared before Judge Thomas Hogan, who finally releasedhim on Nov. 23, 2022, he told Ryan, with his long unkempt hair and fingernails, that he looked like Tom Hanks in the film Cast Away.

Every night, for the two years Ryan was held in solitary confinement, Bonnie and her two small boys would say prayers that Ryan would one day come home. She said she and her family have received numerous death threats.

“Ryan deals with insomnia,” Bonnie said of her husband. “He deals with extreme anxiety, depression and paranoia. He will not even go outside of his backyard because he’s scared that if he goes outside, that they’re going to take him back to jail. He has liver issues from the food that he ate because they fed him baloney sandwiches and trash while he was in D.C. He’s having a lot of medical issues. He also has lower testosterone than a 60-year-old man because he wasn’t able to have any sunlight. His vitamin D levels are low. The list goes on and on. This man does not sleep at night. He has nightmares. He whimpers at night in his sleep because he has dreams that he’s back in D.C. I mean, he’s a mess. This is the result of what has happened to him. He has vision loss. He doesn’t see as good as he used to.”

Ryan’s family, like many families of those charged, are struggling financially. Bonnie said their savings are gone. She and Ryan are heavily in debt. She has set up a fundraising page here.

“We are God-loving patriots,” she said. “Who’s going to be next? It’s not about Republican or Democrat or white or Black, Christian, or Muslim. We are all children of God. We are all U.S. American citizens. We are all entitled to our constitutional rights and freedom of speech. We can all come together and agree on that, right?”

The cheerleading, or at best indifference, by Democratic Party supporters and much of the left to these show trials will come back to haunt them. We are exacerbating the growing tribalism and political antagonisms that will increasingly express themselves through violence. We are complicit, once again, of using the courts to carry out vendettas. We are corroding democratic institutions. We are hardening the ideology and rage of the far-right. We are turning those being hounded to prison into political prisoners and martyrs. We are moving ever closer towards tyranny.

NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.

The Cuban socialist healthcare system is internationally recognized as one of the best in the world.1 It is innovative, preventative, people-oriented, comprehensive, community-centered, internationalist, and, of course, de-commodified—treating healthcare as a human right, not a profitable commodity. However, in spite of its extraordinary successes, the United States’ sixty-year long blockade has tremendously detrimental effects on Cuban life in general, and their healthcare system in particular. As Amnesty International reported, the US blockade “limits Cuba’s capacity to import medicines, medical equipment, and the latest technologies, some of which are essential for treating life-threatening diseases.”2

The intentions behind the US blockade on Cuba have always been clear. As Lester Mallory, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in 1960:

Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba. If such a policy [blockade] is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government . . . the only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.3

The blockade is thus aimed at making the material conditions of Cubans as difficult as possible, creating fertile soil for discontent in the Cuban revolutionary process to arise. However, the United States doesn’t leave the arrival of discontent to chance. As Tracy Eaton from the Cuba Money Project has shown, the United States, through regime change fronts like the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and the U.S. State Department, has spent more than one billion dollars funding Cuban opposition groups and media within and outside of the country.4 This combination of blockade and opposition funding is a central component of the hybrid warfare against Cuba (as well as other victims of US imperialism).

Notwithstanding the formidable aggression bearing down on Cuba, the island has been able to achieve remarkable success in the fields of medicine, education, sustainable development, sports, etc. In this article, I will briefly highlight how the Cuban healthcare system functions, some of its successes, and how the blockade has affected Cuban medicine and stifled medical development both within Cuba and in the United States.

Speaking to Cuban militias a few months after the revolution, Che, himself a physician by training, would say that

Medicine will have to convert itself into a science that serves to prevent disease and orients the public toward carrying out its medical duties. Medicine should only intervene in cases of extreme urgency, to perform surgery or something else which lies outside the skills of the people of the new society we are creating.5

“Such a profound social change demands,” he would argue, “equally profound changes in the mental structure of the people.”6 Socialist society could not limit itself to creating changes in institutions and the material foundations of society, it is equally vital, as he famously says in Socialism and Man in Cuba, “to build the new man and woman.”7 In the field of medicine, this required the formation of a new type of doctor, “a revolutionary doctor, that is to say a [person] who utilizes the technical knowledge of [their] profession in the service of the revolution and the people.”8

In the same year, Fidel Castro would remark that “the future of Cuba will be a future of [people] of science.”9 This visionary statement was uttered on the heels of a massive exodus of professionals, where half of the doctors, as well as many of the teachers, had left the country. For instance, “only 12 of the 250 Cuban teachers at the University of Havana’s Medical School remained.”10 For all the factors pointing otherwise, Fidel’s 1960 proclamation would become true, as today Cuba is the country with the most doctors per capita. This was not a coincidental development. Since 1959, the revolution reorganized the 1909-founded Ministry of Health and Welfare into the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP), which created “a single, national, state-run health system that sets short, medium, and long-term policies.”11 With its goal of training generations of humanistic medical professionals dedicated to the revolutionary process, Cuba eliminated university tuition, made textbooks free, developed various scholarship plans, and constructed networks of universities which created dozens of schools capable of educating professionals in every province of the country.12 Universal education and universal healthcare went hand in hand – the development of one was the condition for the development of the other.

Cuba’s emphasis on universal education and healthcare within the socialist model allowed the country which lost half of its medical (and other) professionals to develop a surplus which participates in various internationalist missions, almost half of which are done for free (for the poorest countries of the global south), and the other half at a sliding scale.13 Thanks to these internationalist missions (which have been ongoing since the first years of the revolution), millions of human beings from the poorest corners of the planet can say that “they owe their health, if not their lives, to Cuban professionals and the government which trained and sent them.”14

By the middle of the 1970s, after several generations of doctors had been developed within the revolution, Cuba would institutionalize the polyclinic model, a staple of their innovative, community based, socialist healthcare. As Helen Yaffe writes,

A new model of community-based polyclinics was established in 1974 to deliver comprehensive care to residents in their neighbourhoods. Polyclinics gave Cuban communities local access to primary care specialists such as obstetricians, gynaecologists, paediatricians, internists and dental services. Training and policy emphasised the impact of biological, social, cultural, economic and environmental factors on patients.15

Far from the reductive and deterministic frameworks often found in Western capitalist medicine, Cuban healthcare emphasizes the dialectical relationship of the individual and their community and of the biological and the social. Such an integrative and relational framework allows for a more comprehensive approach to treatment. With the polyclinics and the 1984 “family doctor” programs, the integration of doctors within the individual’s “everyday environment” allowed, as Che hoped, for the preventative and communal dimension of healthcare to thrive.16
​
The most interesting dimension of Cuban healthcare, in my view, is its emphasis on prevention. The emphasis on prevention stands as a pinnacle of medical practice, one which would seem like lunacy in the US. When profits are in command, why would anyone do something which might prevent more profits from being realized in the future? When people are what matters, like in Cuba, the goal of medical practice is almost self-destructive, in the sense that the aim is to destroy the conditions, i.e., the sicknesses, which make medical treatment necessary in the first place. The opposite is true when health care is subjected to the same logic as everything else under capitalism. Instead of its natural tendency for self-abolition, the tendency here is towards proliferation, i.e., towards developing more conditions for which treatment is required. The more treatment needed, the more profit there is to be made.

This puts the for-profit health care system found in the United States—the only developed country in the world without socialized medicine—in an irreconcilable antagonism with what the essence of medical care entails. It also creates fertile ground, as we saw with regards to the COVID vaccines, for a large portion of the population to develop medical and scientific skepticism. After all, if it is the same pharmaceutical industrial complex that, in collaboration with the US government, proliferated the criminal but profitable opioid crisis which kills seventy thousand Americans yearly, it does not seem irrational for a portion of the population to lack trust in the same pharmaceutical industry’s handling of the pandemic.17 This absence of trust in medical institutions does not exist in Cuba, where people know that medicine′s first and only goal is to serve the people. As Hippocrates (from whom we get the Hippocratic oath that is ingrained in every medical trainee in the United States) argued, “a physician’s aim in dealing with any illness . . . should be to halt the conditions that promote its flourishing.” It shouldn’t be that, as for-profit health care promotes, those conditions are sustained or metamorphized into others so that profitable treatment may continue.18


Cuba’s innovative, preventative, community-centered, and holistic approach to healthcare is the reason why, in spite of the tremendous material difficulties the blockade creates, Cuba is considered to have one of – if not the – most efficient healthcare system in the world. After sixty years of socialism, Cubans are amongst the healthiest and longest-living people in the world, living on average three years longer than Americans.19 Besides the sixteen year increase in life expectancy the revolution has achieved since 1959, it has also had the largest reduction in infant mortality, from 6 to 0.41 percent, the lowest in the whole Western hemisphere.20 “Infectious and contagious diseases like polio, malaria, neonatal tetanus, diphtheria, measles, rubella, mumps, whooping cough and dengue,” which are frequently found in the poorest parts of the world, “have been eradicated.”21


Cuban medical sciences, thanks to the importance and investment the state affords it, has made prodigious inroads in cancer, diabetes, HIV, and other areas of medical study.22 With regards to lung cancer, perhaps the “best-known innovation is the CimaVax vaccine, created by researchers at the Havana’s Center for Molecular Immunology (CIM), which acts on the growth factor of cancer cells to prevent the disease from spreading.”23 The most common cancer death is lung cancer, which killed around 1.8 million people worldwide in 2020.24 With the US blockade in place, thousands of Americans are deprived of the prolongation and enhancement of their lives which the CimaVax vaccine would provide.25 While clinical trials and collaboration had begun during the Cuban thaw, when Obama partially lifted the blockade, the full reinstatement of the blockade with Trump, and its continuation and proliferation with Biden, has once again removed the hope the Cuban vaccine could bring to the hundreds of thousands of Americans with lung cancer.26


Along with CimaVAx, Racotumomab and VSSP are “promising cancer drugs invented by CIM.”27 As Cuba Debate reported,


Racotumomab targets a molecule that scientists believe is found in all cancer cells, meaning the drug could one day be effective against leukemia and the tumors that accompany lung, breast, colon and prostate cancers. VSSP, originally designed as a compound to activate the immune response to vaccines, also appears to stimulate the immune response against cancer.28


Recent research into VSSP has shown that it “significantly reduce[s] myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSC) among people with advanced kidney cancer,” paving “the way for a new treatment” for the disease.29


In addition to its successes in cancer research, “in 2015, the World Health Organization recognized Cuba as the first country to eliminate the transmission of HIV from mother to child.”30 This is a feat that Dr. Margaret Chan, at the time the Director-General of the WHO, said was “an important step towards having a generation free of AIDS.”31


Cuban medical sciences have also succeeded in developing what has been called the diabetes miracle treatment, Heberprot-P. As Cuba Debate reports,


When uncontrolled diabetes damages the nerves and blood vessels in a person’s foot, it can cause one of the disease’s most debilitating complications: diabetic foot ulcers, capable of penetrating the bone. These ulcers can even become gangrenous and, in the worst case, cause the amputation of a finger, foot or even a leg. Since 2006, Cuba has had a medicine for ulcers called Heberprot-P, which avoids the need to amputate. Its inventors, scientists from the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Havana, describe this treatment as “an epidermal growth factor” that is injected next to the affected area and can accelerate the skin’s healing process, closing the wound in about three months.32
​

Heberprot-P has shown nearly an 80 percent  success rate in preventing amputation, an incredible fact considering that up to 60 percent of amputations lead to death within five years, and up to 80 percent within ten years.33 In the United States, diabetes is the seventh most common cause of death, affecting more than one in ten adults, and prediabetes affecting one in three. Each year 1.4 million Americans are diagnosed with diabetes, and more than one hundred thousand die from the disease.34 Nonetheless, Heberprot-P, a treatment which, according to Manuel Raíces, the Communications Executive at the Cuban Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB), could reduce the risk of US amputations in half, saving tens of thousands of lives a year, is prevented from being used in the US because of the blockade.35

​For thirty consecutive years the United Nations General Assembly has voted in favor of lifting the US blockade on Cuba.36 In the recent vote in November 2022, 185 countries voted in favor of lifting the blockade, and only two countries, the United States and Israel, voted in favor of sustaining the blockade.37 It is estimated that the last sixty years of the US blockade has cost Cuba 1.3 trillion dollars.38 It is impossible to overestimate how difficult this has made the construction of socialism in Cuba, and the development of their healthcare system and medical sciences in particular.

As Cuba’s Ministry for Public Health reports,

[Cuba] is denied the right to acquire technologies, raw materials, reagents, diagnostic means, medicines, devices, equipment and spare parts necessary for the best functioning of its National Health System, which must be obtained in geographically distant markets or through a third country, with an increase in costs.

Technologies from the United States or with more than 10 percent of components from that country cannot be acquired by the Island, which has a negative impact on healthcare.

In some cases, it is necessary to send patients abroad at a much higher cost than doing the procedure in national territory, if the technology were available.39

There are a plethora of examples to point to where the blockade prohibits Cuba from accessing medicine, technologies, equipment, etc. that it would need to save or improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of Cubans. American companies and manufactures with more than 10 percent of American capital backing it frequently ignore, and sometimes explicitly reject, Cuba’s requests for purchasing their products. For instance, as Cuba reported to the United Nations:

From January to July 2021, the Medical Products Import and Export Company (MEDICUBA S.A.) contacted 65 US companies to inquire about the possibilities of importing medicines, equipment, devices and other supplies necessary for the care of the Cuban people through the national health system. Of these, 56 did not respond to the requests of the Cuban entity, and three responded negatively (OWENS & MINOR, INC., MERCURY MEDICAL and ELI LILLY).

The OHMEDA, GENERAL ELECTRIC and HEWLETT PACKARD Companies were asked for multipurpose mechanical ventilators for newborns and infants, as well as multipurpose cardiomonitors (which include blood pressure monitoring, among other parameters). Its acquisition has yet to be made possible.

In the same way, the ONE-LAMBDA Company was asked for kits for HLA typing, essential to determine the compatibility of a kidney transplant candidate with possible donors; they could not be acquired either.40

“Some 158,800 Cuban patients,” the report argues, “are harmed by the impossibility of accessing technology for the implantation of percutaneous aortic valves (TAVI)” which would, through a “small surgical procedure,” greatly improve people’s quality of lives and prevent more complex surgeries and longer hospitalizations.41 American companies such as EDWARD LIFESCIENCE (Edwards-SAPIEN valve) and MEDTRONIC (CoreValve valve) have control over the TAVI valves and, because of the blockade, prohibit Cuba from access.

Likewise, “if Cuba could access the drug Nusinersen, produced only by the US multinational company BIOGEN,” more than half of its children who struggle with infantile spinal atrophy could survive much longer and attain a better quality of life.42
The IQ 577 Laser System model, produced by the US company IRIDEX CORPORATION, could treat “retinal disorders and glaucoma” for dozens of Cuban babies born with retinopathy from prematurity who are at risk of going blind; because of the blockade, those Cuban babies will not be able to receive that treatment.43

In many instances, additional licenses are required to sell to Cuba, even when the companies are not American and have less than 10 percent of American capital. As the Cuban Ministry for Public Health reports, shortages were caused in blood bags because the usual supplier, UNFAMED, “reported that the company Terumo BCT of Japan had its bank account blocked, since they must have an Additional License that allows them to sell to Cuba products that are not produced in the United States.”44

The “US’s exploitation of the pandemic to increase pressure for regime change” also affords a variety of examples for how the blockade affects Cuban healthcare.45 For instance, at the height of the pandemic, while WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus asked for countries to put their sanctions “in quarantine” because “thousands of lives are at stake,” the US company Vyaire Medical bought ventilator manufacturers IMTMedical and Acutronic, immediately banning all sale of ventilators to Cuba.46 Around the same time, Jack Ma’s foundation tried to send Cuba one hundred thousand facemasks, ten Covid diagnostic kits, ventilators, and gloves, all of which was stopped by Avianca, a Colombian Airline whose “major shareholder is a U.S.-based company subject to the trade embargo on Cuba.”47 Similarly, the donations from Swiss solidarity organizations MediCuba-Suiza and Asociación Suiza-Cuba to help Cuba fight COVID where refused to be transferred by the Swiss banks UBS, Cler, and Cantonal Bank of Basilea.48

While Cuba was helping the world fight COVID-19 through the Henry Reeve Brigade (for which it was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize), the United States was busy preventing the world from helping Cuba, banking on the pandemic-blockade dual force to fulfill the conditions Lestor Mallory proposed for regime change.49 Despite the difficulties, Cuba was able to develop five viable vaccines, vaccinating over 90 percent of its population, and delivering hundreds of millions of doses to the global south free of charge.50 However, because of the US blockade, the early days of the pandemic saw Cuba lacking access to the syringes needed to effectively vaccinate its population with the vaccines it developed.51

The internationally denounced blockade on Cuba by the United States is a gross violation of human rights, one which affects both Cubans and the hundreds of thousands of Americans who would have better quality of lives, and even their lives saved, had the United States not prevented their people from having access to novel treatments in cancer, diabetes, and advances in other fields of research developed by Cuban scientists. The spirit of science and scientific inquiry is nourished with openness and collaboration. The US blockade prevents this from occurring, stifling scientific progress.

However, if there is something the last sixty years have demonstrated, it is that the Cuban people are committed to their revolutionary process and unwilling to compromise their socialism and sovereignty. Lestor Mallory’s hope for the blockade would not bear fruit.  Even in the periods where the US warfare on Cuba has produced the most formidable of challenges in attaining the necessary materials to ensure the subsistence of the Cuban people, the mass of Cubans have brazenly defended the revolutionary process, with the slogan of their Bronze Titan Antonio Maceo engraved on their chest: “Whoever tries to take over Cuba will only collect the dust of their blood-soaked soil, if they do not perish in the fight.”52 With the initial goal of the blockade unable to concretize, the only reason for its proliferation is to perpetuate senseless suffering, both of Cuban and American people. As those who recognize the emancipatory potential of science and believe that science should serve the people, we have a duty to stand in solidarity with the Cuban people and mobilize to #EndtheBlockade on Cuba.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

On 28 October 2005, a special event was held in Caracas at the National Assembly of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. At this gathering, held on the birthday of Simón Rodríguez (Simón Bolívar’s teacher), the Venezuelan government announced that nearly 1.5 million adults had learned to read through Mission Robinson, a mass literacy programme that it initiated two years earlier. The mission was named after Rodríguez (who was also known by the pseudonym Samuel Robinson).

One of those adults, María Eugenia Túa (age 70), stood beside President Hugo Chávez Frías and said, ‘We are no longer poor. We are rich in knowledge’. The Venezuelan government built Mission Robinson based on a Cuban teaching method for adult literacy called Yo sí puedo (‘Yes I can’) developed by Dr. Leonela Relys Díaz of the Latin American and the Caribbean Pedagogical Institute (IPLAC) in Cuba. On that day, Venezuela declared to the United Nations that its people had transcended illiteracy.

The previous year, in December 2004, Chávez spoke at the graduation ceremony of 433 students from the Yo sí puedo programme held at the Teresa Carreño Theatre in Caracas. Mission Robinson, Chávez said, is going to ‘organise the army of light’ that will take literacy to the people, wherever they live, taking ‘Mohammed to the mountain’. Commenting on the educational journey of one of the graduates, Chávez described the opportunities that stem from literacy: ‘She has not wasted any time and is already learning mathematics and geography, Spanish language and literature. And she is studying Bolivarian ideas because she can read. She can read the Constitution. She can read Bolívar’s writings. She can read the letters that Bolívar wrote’.

The Bolivarian process organised the distribution of world literature and non-fiction books to libraries created in working class neighbourhoods in order to ‘arm ourselves with knowledge’, Chávez said. Quoting the Cuban national hero José Martí, Chávez reflected on the relationship between education, emancipation, and the history being made by the Venezuelan people: ‘To be cultured in order to be free. To know who we are, to know our history in depth, that history from which we come’.
​
For Rosa Hernández, one of the graduates, the mission provided ‘clarity because before there was darkness. Now that I know how to read and write… I see everything clearly’. María Gutiérrez, Rosa’s classmate, said that her entry into the ‘army of light’ took place ‘thanks to God, to my president, and to the teachers who taught me’.

Ten years ago, on 5 March 2013, Hugo Chávez died in Caracas after a prolonged fight against cancer. His death rattled Venezuela, where large sections of impoverished workers mourned not just a president, but the man they felt was their comandante. As Chávez’s cortege passed through Bolívar Square, Alí Primera’s 1976 song, Los que mueren por la vida (‘Those Who Die for Life’), rang out from the crowd:

Those who die for life
Can’t be called dead.
And from this moment
It is forbidden to cry for them.

It is forbidden to cry, they sang, not because they did not want to grieve, but because it was clear that the legacy of Chávez was not in his own life but in the difficult work of building socialism.

Six years after Chávez’s death, I walked with Mariela Machado through the Kaikachi housing complex where she lived, in the La Vega neighbourhood of Caracas. During Chávez’s first presidential term, Mariela, her family, and 91 other families occupied a plot of land that had been given to corporate developers by a previous administration but left empty. These working-class families – many of them Afro-Venezuelan – went directly to Chávez and asked to build houses on the plot. ‘Can you do it?’, Chávez asked them. ‘Yes’, said Mariela. ‘We built this city. We can build our own homes. All we want are machines and materials’. And so, with resources from the city, Mariela and her comrades built their modest apartment buildings.

A bust of Chávez sits outside of the community centre, where there is a bakery that provides affordable, high-quality bread to the residents; a kitchen that feeds 400 people; a community hall; and a small room where women sew clothes for a business that they run. ‘We are Chavistas’, another woman told me, her eyes shining, a child at her hip. The word ‘Chavista’ has a special resonance in places such as this. It is not uncommon to see t-shirts with Chávez on them, his image and the iconic ‘Chávez eyes’ everywhere. When I asked Mariela what will happen to Kaikachi if the Bolivarian process falls, she pointed to the neighbouring apartment buildings of the well-heeled and said, ‘If the government falls, we will be evicted. We – Black, poor, working class – will lose what we have’.

Mariela, Rosa, María, and millions of other people like them – ‘Black, poor, working class’, as Mariela said, but also indigenous and marginalised – carry with them the new vital energy of the Bolivarian Revolution, which began with Chávez’s electoral victory in 1998 and continues to this day. This sentiment is encapsulated in the Chavista slogan, ‘We are the Invisible. We are the Invincible. We will overcome’.

Observers of the Bolivarian Revolution often point to this or that policy in order to understand or define the process. But what is rarely acknowledged is the theory that Chávez developed during his fifteen years as president. It is as if Chávez did things but did not think about them, as if he was not a theorist of the revolutionary process. Such attitudes towards leaders and intellectuals of the working class are insidious, reducing the strength of their intellect to a spate of thoughtless or spontaneous actions. But, as Chávez (and many others) showed, this bias is unfounded. Each time I saw Chávez, he wanted to talk about the books he had been reading – Marxist classics, certainly, but also the newest books in Latin America (and always the latest writings of Eduardo Galeano, whose book, Open Veins of Latin America, he gave to US President Barack Obama in 2009). He was concerned with big ideas and questions of the day, above all the challenges of building socialism in a poor country with a rich resource (oil, in the case of Venezuela). Chávez was constantly theorising, reflecting and elaborating upon the ideas shared with him by women such as Mariela, Rosa, and María, and testing these ideas through practical experiments in policy. Bourgeois narratives are quick to dismiss the country’s literacy campaign as nothing extraordinary, but this misses its significance entirely, both in terms of its underlying theory and its immense impact on Venezuelan society. The point of Mission Robinson was not merely to teach people how to read, but also that the Yo sí puedo curriculum would encourage political literacy. As Chávez said of the Yo sí puedo graduate in 2004, ‘she is studying Bolivarian ideas because she can read. She can read the Constitution. She can read Bolívar’s writings’.

This graduate would become one of many women leaders in her community. Another, Alessandra Trespalacios, participated in social programmes in a wretchedly poor area and became a leader in the Altos de Lidice Commune’s community council and health clinic. It is women such as Alessandra who began to weigh children and the elderly in their neighbourhood as a part of their poverty eradication policy, and who would give the underweight extra food from their stores. ‘We are motivated by love’, she said, but also by the revolutionary ideas that she and her fellow students learnt from Mission Robinson.

To commemorate the ten-year anniversary of Hugo Chávez’s death, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Simón Bolívar Institute for Peace and Solidarity (Venezuela) are pleased to offer you our dossier no. 61, The Strategic Revolutionary Thought and Legacy of Hugo Chávez Ten Years After His Death (February 2023). This text is a preliminary account of Chávez’s revolutionary theory, which was built out of the necessity to improve the everyday lives of the Venezuelan people, out of the challenge to construct housing, health care, and literacy programmes, but then went further, delving into how to transform the country’s productive relations and defend the sovereignty of Venezuela and Latin America from US imperialism. It is, as we write, a theory that is ‘alive and entirely revolutionary’ and not ‘a recipe nor a set of dry academic reflections’.

The thinking of Chávez starts at the desk of an indigenous woman in the heart of the Venezuelan plains, a woman whose reading of the Constitution of 1999 – ratified with a 72% vote in favour – motivated her to become a leader in her town, perhaps of Sabaneta (in Barinas state), where Chávez was born on 28 July 1954. That’s always the start of his theory.

We hope you will read, share, and discuss our dossier to better understand the praxis of the Bolivarian Revolution. A few years ago, Anacaona Marin, who leads the El Panal commune in the 23 de Enero barrio in Caracas, told me, ‘A connection is often made between socialism and misery. In our work, through the Chávez method, this connection will be broken. It cannot be broken by words alone, but by deeds. That is chavismo’.

Warmly,
​
Vijay

As many heads of state and prime ministers ponder the war in Ukraine, I call attention to one head of state, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. In a January 1, 2023 interview with Franco-Spanish journalist and author Ignacio Ramonet, President Maduro said, “The war in Ukraine is part of the labor pains of a world that will emerge.” Here is his full commentary on the international situation.

“The world is undoubtedly in a very difficult situation, we are experiencing the pains of giving birth to a different world. We have always advocated the construction of a pluripolar, multicentric world, with different poles of development, power, centers that accompany all regions of the world. The old world of the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, of colonialism, then of the neo-colonialism of the 20th century, must be abandoned for good. No one can believe that from two or three metropolises, one can govern the world, one can subdue the peoples. There are already very strong regions, such as Asia, the Pacific, Africa itself, Latin America and the Caribbean, we are blocks of countries that are becoming poles of world power. Do we have to give up our rights to peace, to development, to scientific and technological progress, to our own cultural models, to our own political models? Do we have to give them up? No. Should we take for granted the unipolar domination of a metropolis that claims to dictate to the world? No. It is the time of a new world, of new geopolitics that redistributes power in the world. The war in Ukraine is part of the labor pains of a world that will emerge. “
​
Readers will have noticed above the following insight from Maduro: “We have always advocated the construction of a pluripolar, multicentric world, with different poles of development, power, centers that accompany all regions of the world.” He also rhetorically asked, “Should we take for granted the unipolar domination of a metropolis that claims to dictate to the world? No.” ​

Furthermore, on January 13, in the annual report for the year 2022 before the National Assembly, President Maduro commented on the international situation, saying in part that the situation “invites the world for the construction of new poles of power of that community of Common Destiny that our older brother President Xi Jinping speaks of Mankind as a community of common destiny. Or of that multipolar, multicentric world that our older brother President Vladimir Putin speaks of. For that world to arrive, a Latin American and Caribbean bloc is necessary that is cohesive, united, advanced.”

The Rage Against the War Machine, which stood up against the US war on Russia in Ukraine, was the first national anti-war demonstration in the capital in years. This was a groundbreaking event, showing that the anti-war movement has revived on a national scale after years of relative quiescence. Yet this success was not welcomed by some leftist anti-war activists. People may be acquainted with the issue of Libertarians as a key sponsor of the rally, and some of the views or alleged views of some of the speakers – views unrelated to the demands of the demonstration.
​
Underlying this are deeper causes for the conflict.

Some consciously, some not, seek to build a “left” anti-war coalition, an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist one. This confuses an anti-war movement with a left organization. It isolates you from possible allies. It is a myth that anti-war movements are led by leftists, a myth that anti-war movements consist mostly of leftists. Most people protest war because they are sick of war, are against new wars – not because they are leftist, but because they have human feelings. This should not be some new revelation.
​
Movement building means we need to win over the people. And we need committed activists and experienced organizers. Whether they hold an anti-imperialist worldview is secondary. People become anti-imperialist – if they do at all – after becoming politically active, combined with some period of study. Often they become so only temporarily, as we see today with so many on the left supporting US regime change in Ukraine, Nicaragua, Syria, Iran, Hong Kong, or Russia.

The root of these leftists’ mixed-up thinking goes back to the purge of the working class leftwing from the trade union movement after World War II. US government operations drove this class struggle force out of its home base in the working class. The left has not rebuilt its natural home there, nor does it focus on reestablishing the working class as its base. Instead, they orient to the multi-class socially progressive milieu with its nebulous relation to the means of production.

A left that exists separate from a working class leftwing is homeless, cast adrift. In the socially progressive milieu, it rotates around Democratic Party voters, its liberal identity politics, and its disdain for the “deplorables.” Ironically, those who articulated that the Democratic Party is the more effective evil are living proof of the accuracy of this statement.
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A left wing grounded working class would not make such foolish mistakes as not supporting the February 19 demonstration against imperialist war. Nor would a working class leftwing, in contrast to today’s left, have any greater hostility to Trump voters than to Obama, Clinton or Biden voters.

The February 19 anti-war demonstration was dubbed a “left-right” alliance, a term first used by left supporters of US regime change in Syria. These left apologists for the “Syrian Revolution” smeared opponents of that military operation as allied with “fascists” in a “red-brown” alliance. Now this has been picked up by some left opponents of the US war on Russia to attack a demonstration against the present imperial war.

A reality check is in order. People who attack demonstrations against US imperial wars are the ones who are reactionary, not the people who organize the demonstrations. That has always been the case.

Fortunately, many of these have called another anti-war rally on March 18, even if not for the best of reasons.

The demands of the Rage Against the War Machine rally were: Not One More Penny for War in Ukraine; Negotiate Peace; Stop the War Inflation; Disband NATO; Global Nuclear De-Escalation; Slash the Pentagon Budget; Abolish the CIA and Military Industrial Deep State; Abolish War and Empire; Restore Civil Liberties; and Free Julian Assange.

While it is not clear what is meant by “left” and “right,” the demands of the rally are directed against the national security state, the actual government of this country. If you confront it, then you are not supporting it, and we are on the same side.

Why did some lefty people set up a litmus test on other issues unrelated to the Rage Against the War Machine demands to determine who should be allowed to participate? If you want to weaken a movement, that is what you would do.  Shun people who hold dissimilar beliefs on issues unrelated to the demands of the demonstration? That is a definition of sectarian.
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A demonstration gives us the opportunity to explain our anti-imperialist message to other participants. If we don’t use that opportunity, then we don’t do our job.

SOA Watch organized annual rallies outside Fort Benning against US military intervention and murder in Latin America. The protests were staged and funded by different orders and groups of the Catholic Church. Most participants came from Catholic orders and schools. These are organizations opposed to women’s right to choose, opposed to LGBT rights. Were the SOA Watch rallies a “left-right” alliance we should attack instead of joining? Attack the protests for being a platform legitimizing anti-woman and anti-gay groups?

Fred Hampton and Bobby Lee of the Chicago Black Panthers showed how class-conscious activists work with seemingly hostile groups. In the late 1960s these Panthers helped create a Rainbow Coalition of poor blacks, Puerto Ricans, and southern whites to fight for fair housing, economic equality, and against police brutality. The whites, Young Patriot Organization (YPO) was based in Hillbilly Harlem, in uptown Chicago. They wore the Confederate flag as their emblem, and many were racist. But like blacks and latinos, the Young Patriots and their families experienced discrimination – being poor and from the South. Fred Hampton tolerated YPO members wearing their Confederate flag patches at meetings and rallies. It came to take on a new meaning within the Rainbow Coalition. The YPO began wearing the Confederate flag with black power symbols and slogans. Despite the racial divisions, the BPP and YPO found common cause in the fight against their oppression. Through their joint work, the Young Patriots cast off their white supremacy views, including the Confederate flag. They saw they had in much common with the Black Panthers and latino Young Lords. This is but one example of people, focused on taking on the imperialist power structure, overcame their “left-right” divisions and worked together to fight their common oppressor.

Medea Benjamin, a sensible and highly respected anti-war activist, no sectarian, had this to say about Rage Against the War Machine:

Many people have asked me why I am not speaking at the Rage Against the War Machine rally in DC on Feb. 19. Here’s why:

I supported the Rage Against the War Machine Rally from the time of its conception and I support it today, even though I will not be one of the speakers because the organization I have been associated with for 20 years, CODEPINK, urged me not to speak…

So why do I support the rally?

Because I am heartbroken by a war that is causing such death and destruction in Ukraine.

Because I have real fears that this war could lead us into World War III or a nuclear confrontation.

Because both political parties are complicit in giving over $100 billion to Ukraine to keep this war going.

Because the Biden administration is pushing this war to weaken Russia instead of promoting solutions.

Because we urgently need as many voices as possible, from a broad variety of perspectives, to speak out so we can be much more effective at pressuring Congress and the White House to move this conflict from the bloody battlefield to the negotiating table. The future of our world stands in the balance.”

Those are the key issues. To emphasize: on the anniversary of the Ukraine war, the two superpowers are in combat. The US government states it remains committed to driving Russia out of the Ukraine; Russia says defeat threatens its very existence. Recall Biden said a year ago that US and European sanctions would make Russia leave Ukraine. The war has only escalated since then. Where will it lead?
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Tulsi Gabbard began her speech with the day in January 2018 when Hawaiians were warned on their cell phones “Ballistic missile inbound. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.” To think the leaders of the US and Russia will not blunder into a nuclear war, given all the previous incidents over the years, reveals a naïve faith in our leaders. To refuse to work with “the right” to avoid Ukraine becoming a nuclear war is mind-boggling in its stupidity. The Libertarians show their approach is not so sectarian. Those who brought us Rage Against the War Machine recognized that if we are to defeat the non-stop imperial war machine that rules over our lives, we must work with all people possible under its boot. Until we all do, we defeat ourselves.

This article was republished from Orinoco Tribune. ​

The fight for a common front framed in the multilateralist vision, which strengthens the peoples with conscience and worldview against the hegemonic American and European terrorism, which only thinks of invasions, interference, looting and exploitation of natural resources at the cost of death, pain, misery; It is the fundamental strategy in the relations between the countries that today face the blows and the inhuman sanctions of the policies and pressures of imperialism, such is the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran that with its 44 years of resistance has been supporting progress and independence of the countries not only of Asia; but also throughout the Patria Grande.
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In this sense, the expansion of bilateral relations between Iran and Bolivia are an example of the alliance between these two States that share an identical revolutionary consciousness in strengthening and cooperation in the face of unilateralism; the same widely deepened and put into debate by the Iranian Vice Foreign Minister for political affairs, Ali Bagheri Kani, who in recent days on his official visit to the Andean country took the opportunity to present the foreign policy of his country in the main hall of the Political Science career and Public Management from the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (UMSA).

In his speech, Bagheri emphasized that Iran is sharing its experience of more than four decades of its resistance against the pressures and sanctions imposed against it by the US hegemon, after the victory of the Islamic revolution in Iran; those that have led it to consolidate due to its advances and achievements, in science, medicine, education, obtaining fourth place in robotics and nanotechnology worldwide or being the first country to nationalize its oil, also being a power in technology and production of drones, missiles, satellites, rockets, as well as being ranked 18th among the largest economies in the world.

As Iran is a regional power, it plays a key role in the fight against terrorism in Western Asia, being a fundamental pillar in the entire Axis of Resistance. The Persian political system is no longer a “mere culture, but an integral and efficient model to govern a State” that does not carry out coups, that does not intervene; but it supports the countries that are sanctioned, blocked.

Today, in the 21st century, it is urgent to join efforts in unity, in the integration of peoples, “because if we do not align ourselves, we will not be able to defeat the common enemy,” said the Iranian Vice Foreign Minister, recalling that his country defeated terrorist groups such as ISIS (DAESH in Arabic), Al Qaeda, Al Nusra Front, created in the US breeding ground, which has been the cause of the largest humanitarian disasters in the Middle East and the world, whose consequences have exceeded the borders of countries paradoxically being a problem for international society due to the wave of terrorist attacks by the misnamed “Islamic State”, who were created by the US, as Donald Trump pointed out when he stated that Obama and Hillary Clinton are its “co-founders” —who also added— “Obama is the founder of Daesh, and (…) that Hillary Clinton is the co-founder”.

At the same time, Bagheri made reference to Iranophobia, the media war created by the US, Europe and their lackeys to cultivate an anti-Iranian policy, we see this in the manipulation, in the misrepresentation of the news, in the constant fake news; since the international news that comes from Iran is not direct, but by news agencies such as Reuters, which is based in the United Kingdom, also France-Presse (AFP) based in Paris, and Associated Press (AP) based in United States, which are influenced by imperialist policies; therefore public opinion is not well informed of Washington’s inhumane measures that go against the Charter of the United Nations.

Today, the struggle of the peoples with a multilateralist, anti-imperialist vision that watches over the rights of all international actors is regaining strength; In this sense, the policies of solidarity and brotherhood are a tangible reality, since the country of the Ayatollahs collaborates and alleviates the sanctions and hybrid coups that the US and Europe inflict against Venezuela, Cuba or Nicaragua, countries to which today it cooperates by sending aid; such as the arrival of gasoline tankers to blockaded Venezuela, the establishment of Iranian hospitals in Bolivia, assistance in oil, energy, agricultural and livestock matters to Nicaragua, or to Cuba in fishing, biotechnological and water resources matters, strengthening ties of friendship and cooperation not only with these countries; but even with those who do not have the same ideological position, since solidarity and brotherhood should follow this frank and sincere line in the face of world peace against the totalitarian, rebellious and warmongering positions of the enemies of the free peoples of the world.