#black socialists in america

[greentea-mp3]

This is no longer a democracy or even a republic. This is an oligarchy at BEST. It's on It's way to becoming a theocracy. I want to leave so bad. I hate america.

[carlocarrasco]

The woke nuts and diversity freaks who believe in fantasy too much, they criticized Shogun.

Delusions out of control on the parts of the woke and diversity freaks. They themselves end up looking racist.

[alphacmt]

If you're going to be a progressive fighter for change, there's no reason not to do it in style. Let your drip for progress be the flex everyone knows it can be. And remember kids, if anyone asks you what this means, just tell 'em "ARTISTIC COMMUNITIES ARE BEAUTIFUL!" You can BUY THE MERCH on my Threadless link in my Bio. Please and THANK YOU.

https://alphacmt001.threadless.com/designs/floral-acab/mens/t-shirt/regular?variation=front&color=black

[kaydub80]

In crunch time, even Black DSA members showed how loyal to the empire they are

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A taxonomy of corporate bullshit

Next Tuesday (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

There are six lies that corporations have told since time immemorial, and Nick Hanauer, Joan Walsh and Donald Cohen's new book Corporate Bullsht: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power, and Wealth in America* provides an essential taxonomy of this dirty six:

https://thenewpress.com/books/corporate-bullsht

In his review for The American Prospect, David Dayen summarizes how these six lies "offer a civic-minded, reasonable-sounding justification for positions that in fact are motivated entirely by self-interest":

https://prospect.org/culture/books/2023-10-27-lies-my-corporation-told-me-hanauer-walsh-cohen-review/

I. Pure denial

As far back as the slave trade, corporate apologists and mouthpieces have led by asserting that true things are false, and vice-versa. In 1837, John Calhoun asserted that "Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually." George Fitzhugh called enslaved Africans in America "the freest people in the world."

This tactic never went away. Children sent to work in factories are "perfectly happy." Polluted water is "purer than the water that came from the river before we used it." Poor families "don't really exist." Pesticides don't lead to "illness or death." Climate change is "beneficial." Lead "helps guard your health."

II. Markets can solve problems, governments can't

Alan Greenspan made a career out of blithely asserting that markets self-correct. It was only after the world economy imploded in 2008 that he admitted that his doctrine had a "flaw":

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/greenspan-admits-flaw-to-congress-predicts-more-economic-problems

No matter how serious a problem is, the market will fix it. In 1973, the US Chamber of Commerce railed against safety regulations, because "safety is good business," and could be left to the market. If unsafe products persist in the market, it's because consumers choose to trade safety off "for a lower price tag" (Chamber spox Laurence Kraus). Racism can't be corrected with anti-discrimination laws. It's only when "the market" realizes that racism is bad for business that it will finally be abolished.

III. Consumers and workers are to blame

In 1946, the National Coal Association blamed rampant deaths and maimings in the country's coal-mines on "carelessness on the part of men." In 2003, the National Restaurant Association sang the same tune, condemning nutritional labels because "there are not good or bad foods. There are good and bad diets." Reagan's interior secretary Donald Hodel counseled personal responsibility to address a thinning ozone layer: "people who don’t stand out in the sun—it doesn’t affect them."

IV. Government cures are always worse than the disease

Lee Iacocca called 1970's Clean Air Act "a threat to the entire American economy and to every person in America." Every labor and consumer protection before and since has been damned as a plague on American jobs and prosperity. The incentive to work can't survive Social Security, welfare or unemployment insurance. Minimum wages kill jobs, etc etc.

V. Helping people only hurts them

Medicare will "destroy private initiative for our aged to protect themselves with insurance" (Republican Senator Milward Simpson, 1965). Covid relief is unfair to people that are currently in the workforce" (Republican Governor Brian Kemp, 2021). Welfare produces "learned helplessness."

VI. Everyone who disagrees with me is a socialist

Grover Cleveland's 2% on top incomes is "communistic warfare against rights of property" (NY Tribune, 1895). "Socialized medicine" will leave "our children and our children’s children [asking] what it once was like in America when men were free" (Reagan, 1961).

Everything is "socialism": anti-child labor laws, Social Security, minimum wages, family and medical leave. Even fascism is socialism! In 1938, the National Association of Manufacturers called labor rights "communism, bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism."

As Dayen says, it's refreshing to see how the right hasn't had an original idea in 150 years, and simply relies on repeating the same nonsense with minor updates. Right wing ideological innovation consists of finding new ways to say, "actually, your boss is right."

The left's great curse is object permanence: the ability to remember things, like the fact that it used to be possible for a worker to support a family of five on a single income, or that the economy once experienced decades of growth with a 90%+ top rate of income tax (other things the left manages to remember: the "intelligence community" are sociopathic monsters, not Trump-slaying heroes).

When the business lobby rails against long-overdue antitrust action against Amazon and Google, object permanence puts it all in perspective. The talking points about this being job-destroying socialism are the same warmed-over nonsense used to defend rail-barons and Rockefeller. "If you don't like it, shop elsewhere," has been the corporate apologist's line since slavery times.

As Dayen says, Corporate Bullshit is a "reference book for conservative debating points, in an attempt to rob them of their rhetorical power." It will be out on Halloween:

https://bookshop.org/a/54985/9781620977514

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/27/six-sells/#youre-holding-it-wrong

[intersectionalpraxis]

Please look into Claudia De la Cruz! She's a 2024 USA presidential candidate with the Party for Socialism and Liberation and she is actively participating in pro-Palestine protests. If you like her, please help spread her name!

Thank you! For folks living in the United States, please look into Claudia De la Cruz!

Here is their main web page: https:// votesocialist 2024 [dot][com]/ (just in case it's not visible).

I have attached some screenshots here of their campaign and movement. I highly recommend looking into these folks, too, because there's a lot of powerful and empowering plans and promises here rooted in liberation/anti-capitalism/class consciousness, I'm so glad you shared this here!

Their program has an extensive list of their focuses, and for those interested in reading more, the link I provided will lead you to it. Some of their program includes:

Seize the Biggest 100 Corporations, Create A New Economy for the People

Overthrow the Dictatorship of the Rich — Build a Democracy That Serves the Working Class

End the Rule of Money and Lock Up the Corrupt Elite

Cut the Military Budget by 90% — Peace, Not War with China & Russia!

End the War on Black America!

Defend Women’s Rights, Full Equality for LGBTQ People

Save the Planet from Capitalism

If folks are interested in supporting them, they have a donation section and more you can read about. I will definitely some more time to read about them a bit more, but this is exciting. A socialist movement is something I'm 100% aligned with!

[determinate-negation]

What is important to understand about that moment was that Zionism was a political choice — not only by western imperial powers, but also by Jewish leadership. They could have fought more strenuously for Jewish immigration to the United States. And a lot of the Zionist leaders actually fought against immigration to the United States. There were a number of stories reported in the Jewish Communist press about how Zionists collaborated with the British and Americans to force Jews to go to Mandate Palestine, when they would have rather gone to the United States, or England. There’s a famous quote by Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, who said the only reason the United States sent Jews to Palestine was ​“because they do not want too many more of them in New York.” And the Zionists agreed with this.

While this may seem like ancient history, it is important because it disrupts the common sense surrounding Israel’s formation. ​“Yes, maybe there could have been peace between Jews and Palestinians, but the Holocaust made all of that impossible.” And I would say that this debate after 1945 shows that there was a long moment in which there were other possibilities, and another future could have happened

[…]

Question: Who or what is responsible for the erasure of this history of Jewish, left anti-Zionism?

I wouldn’t blame the erasure solely on the Soviet Union or Zionism, because we also have to think of the Cold War and how the Cold War destroyed the old Jewish left, and really drove it underground and shattered its organizations. So I think we also have to see how the turn toward Zionism was understood as something that would normalize Jews in a post-war era.

With the execution of the Rosenbergs, the Red Scare of the late 1940s and ​’50s, and the virtual banning of the Communist Party, which had been throughout the 1930s and ​’40s half Jewish, for much of the Jewish establishment, aligning themselves with American imperialism was a way for Jews to normalize their presence in the United States. And hopefully that moment has to some degree passed. We can see the emptiness and barrenness of aligning ourselves with an American imperial project, with people like Bari Weiss and Jared Kushner. Why would someone like Bari Weiss, who describes herself as liberal, want to align herself with the most reactionary forces in American life?

It’s a bloody matrix of assimilation and whiteness that emerged out of the Cold War suburbanization of the 1950s. Israel was part of that devil’s bargain. Yes, you can become real Americans: You can go to good U.S. universities, you can join the suburbs, enter into the mainstream of American life, as long as you do this one little thing for us, which is back the American Empire. Hopefully, with the emergence of new grassroots organizations in the United States, among Jews and non-Jews who are questioning the U.S. role supporting Zionism, this calculus can begin to change. With the rise of Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, the Democratic Socialists of America and the Movement for Black Lives all taking a serious stance against U.S. support for Zionism, the common sense in the Jewish community has begun to move in a different direction, particularly among the younger generation. The battle is very far from over, but it makes me just a little optimistic about the future.”

- The Forgotten History of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Left

[jewish-sideblog]

"Both indigenous and colonizers" CAN PEOPLE STOP TALKING ABOUT SHIT THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND PLEASE

This wave of antisemitism and bullshit about "indigenous vs colonizer" makes me so scared as an indigenous person in the US of what will happen when Land Back movements do result in actual sovereignty restoration and then tribes do what people do and disagree over land and resources, like we were doing for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Will we be reduced down to colonizers too??

It feels like Westerners, especially USAmericans, have such a black and white idea of what it means to be indigenous and what it means to be a colonizer/settler (because those terms are always conflated) and it makes me so angry and frustrated to see people apply those standards and lines thinking not just to complex sovereignty movements in their own countries but also to incredibly complex conflicts and wars happening on the other side of the world.

The damage I've seen done to sovereignty movements here in the US alone, people going around claiming that we want all "settlers" to go back to Europe or that we're going to start massacring people, has been horrible and the fact that it's all just to justify antisemitism makes me sick.

Genuinely. They're blocked now, but that same person said something to the effect of "Would an Iranian praying in a Mosque built on the ashes of a former synagogue be decolonization?"

And that was the point at which I was like. Ok. It seems like most people genuinely don't actually know what the terms "colonization", "colonizer" and "coloniality" mean. Obviously, that wouldn't be decolonization, because the Jews never colonized Iran. Emigration and colonization aren't the same fucking thing!

I used to have so much faith in my generation. I thought we were critical thinkers, capable of flexibility and engagement with new ideas. But I'm realizing now that we're basically just rebranded boomers. Back in the day, anybody you disagreed with was labelled as a "Communist". It didn't actually fucking matter if they were communist sympathizers, Soviet sympathizers, or even if they were remotely allied with socialist ideals. You could just call them a "Communist" and be done with it, without even understanding what that term means.

It's the same shit today. Instead of a HUAC witch hunt targeting communists, it's a social witch hunt targeting "colonizers" and "Zionists". I am terrified that the moment indigenous rights movements in the Americas and Oceania start making practical strides in Land Back, regaining rightful control over the ways your own land is used, you'll all be labelled as "colonizers" or "imperialists" or whatever the bad buzz word of the month turns out to be.

People simply can't wrap their heads around the idea that indigenous decolonization doesn't have the end goal of ethnically cleansing non-native people from the Americas. And it's because they're so absorbed in colonial thinking. They can't even fucking imagine what sovereignty could look like beyond an authoritarian structure based on control and violence. It's the same with Israel and Palestine-- they think that Jewish sovereignty must look like complete Jewish control to the detriment of Arabs, and they think Palestinian sovereignty must look like total Arab control to the detriment of Jews. The idea that a shared state or a two-state solution is "racist" stems from that false dichotomy.

Establishing an ideological binary of violence that pits "indigenous" against "colonizer", "native" against "settler", and "us" against "them" with no room for cooperation or collaboration is the core of colonialism. Because the core of colonialism is the idea that only one group can have true power at a time. And that's just not the way the world has to work.

[qqueenofhades]

Man, the Russia/Ukraine war has led to a lot of terrible takes from far leftists. I have a mutual from Brazil, a self identified socialist, who is convinced that Ukraine is full of nazis. While they don't support Russia, they questioned why they have to be "pro-Ukraine" or "pro-Russia". They call Ukraine a "nazi hole" but call Russia merely "fascist". Am I wrong in thinking that they've been influenced by Russian propaganda? I know Ukraine does have a nazi/far right problem, but so does the US? And most European countries? idk they strongly hate the US/US government too, and it seems to create some kind of brainrot. at least they don't blindly support China or Russia like tankies do (nor identify with them), but it's still frustrating to take a neutral position on a pretty black and white situation.

I don't want to confront them 1) cause I'm not the type to argue over serious things like this and this may break our long friendship and 2) I'm not super educated on the nazi situation in Ukraine.

Anyway thank you for letting me rant in your inbox.

Yes, Russia has specifically focused its propaganda efforts on Latin America, Africa, and other regions that HAVE suffered from Western/European/American imperialism and are thus predisposed to take the worst view of them/believe that this situation is their fault somehow. This is similar to what the USSR did in newly postcolonial Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, positing themselves as offering the shared hand of communist brotherhood from Western oppressors. Because of more recent events like the invasion of Iraq, which was fully as unjustified as the invasion of Ukraine, Russian propagandists and their eager tankie/leftist foot soldiers have also got a lot of mileage out of "whataboutism." This is likewise an old Soviet propaganda technique designed to deflect any criticism of the actual situation by disingenuously asking "what about this other one!!!"

Likewise, the idea that Ukraine has a "Nazi problem" is itself propaganda. In the last election, far-right/Nazi-identified parties won barely 2% of the vote and AFAIK, no seats at all in the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament). This is far lower than the nearly half of the USA voting for the far-right/Nazi-sympathetic Republican Party, and as noted, the far right elements in the UK and Europe. The idea that Ukraine is "full of Nazis" (with a Jewish president who just celebrated iftar with the Ukrainian Muslims/Crimean Tatars during Ramadan and instituted observance of Muslim holidays nationwide, very Nazi of him) is a line used by Russian propagandists to "justify" their attack and appeal to national memories of the Great Patriotic War (World War II) and the struggle against the Nazis, which is the central cultural grievance/memory in modern Russia. The Putin regime has referred to anyone they don't like, but especially the Ukrainians, as "Nazis" for a long time now, so it's supposedly their holy duty to kill them/commit ethnic cleansing/forcibly reunite the "fraternal" people of "Little Russia," as Ukraine has been called since the 17th century, with "Great Russia." And yeah, no.

Because the West and Europe has been pretty solidly on Ukraine's side, Russia has therefore cultivated countries like China, India, Brazil, etc, who have all suffered from Western interference and are looking to move into the first rank of global superpowers. This is, as noted, similar to the competing systems of influence built during the Cold War, but it also relies on much deeper Russian grievances that go back to the medieval era. Anybody who knows a thing about actual Russian history would therefore know that every single word it says about the Ukraine situation is a lie, but because that lie is useful for many other countries and fits into their own understanding of themselves, it is easy to repeat and act like it's a so-called superior moral position. This is also why US/American tankies so eagerly lap up Russian propaganda, because it plays into their moral sense of themselves as far better than the rest of the West and "righteously" discovering that the West is responsible for all the evil in the world etc etc. While non-Westerners are just helpless misunderstood puppets with no real agency or ability to make complex choices. This totally makes sense!!!

[carlocarrasco]

A Look Back at Spider-Man 2099 #8 (1993)

Disclaimer: This is my original work with details sourced from reading the comic book and doing personal research. Anyone who wants to use this article, in part or in whole, needs to secure first my permission and agree to cite me as the source and author. Let it be known that any unauthorized use of this article will constrain the author to pursue the remedies under R.A. No. 8293, the Revised…

[lesbianspeedy]

Someone Lied To You About Oliver Queen/Green Arrow

Or, maybe you watched a certain show he starred in. Or maybe you’ve only read his stuff post-n52. Hell, maybe you just assumed, that’s okay too, either way, one thing is for sure, Oliver Queen Isn’t Rich. In fact, he’s usually broke as hell and struggling to pay rent! 

(Massive Thank You to @batphobique and @queen-lance for making this post helping me find/source all these panels! Literally wouldn’t have even half of these without their help)

Green Lantern (1960) #87

The original version of the character, practically a Batman clone, was rich, yes. Until in Justice League of America (1960) #75, the late and great Dennis O’Neil reworked his entire character, transforming him into a modern day Robin Hood, and, in aid of this transformation, had him lose all his money after a business rival frames him for embezzlement.

Justice League of America (1960) #75, Action Comics #636, Secret Origins (1986) #38

After that, and the cross-country roadtrip thereafter, Ollie struggled to find work, having a dwindling savings account, and barely scraping enough to make rent. He found occassional work as a columnist, and was for a time working as a public relations agent, though this didn’t end his money problems.

Green Lantern/Green Arrow #6, Action Comics #431 & #424, Green Lantern (1960) #100

This was all during the golden age for Green Arrow, when he was most active on the League, and during the beginning of his relationship with Black Canary. Odds are, if its before the year 2000 and he’s wearing his Neal Adams suit, he’s flat broke.

Action Comics #431, JLA 80 Page Giant #1, World’s Finest #210

It’s important to note, too, that Ollie wasn’t trying to get his money back, he was okay with making do, and even when given the opportunity to have some spare cash, he would rather have it go to something he felt was more important.

Action Comics #424, Green Lantern (1960) #87

To the point that, in a later retcon by O’Neil, instead of losing his money due to a business rival, he instead willingly gave it all away to war relief funds after finding out his company was funding war efforts.

Legends of the DC Universe #9

Later down the line, in the late 80s, Ollie would move to Seattle with Dinah, eventually working with/for her as an assistant florist and delivery driver. With the business from the flower shop and a coincidental big bag of money Ollie kept in his closet they were able to make ends meet together.

Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters #1, Green Arrow (1988) #13, Black Canary (1993) #1

And that’s about the state he stayed in, until his untimely death-cum-resurrection, wherein he’d inheret the stately home, money, and youth centre of an old man who put his name in his will (no spoilers here, go read Quiver). 

He’d continue to use the money to run said centre until the New 52 Reboot, where he’d be reverted to a rich guy, losing and reclaiming and losing and reclaiming his wealth over and over as each writer adapted him to tell their (often unrelated to his character) story.

TLDR: Oliver Queen is not the rich guy you think he is, he’s usually a broke socialist. Please read a comic book before talking about a character...please...just one...

[radiofreederry]

Happy birthday, Paul Robeson! (April 9, 1898)

A celebrated actor and bass-baritone singer with a distinctive booming voice, Paul Robeson was born in Princeton, New Jersey to Reverend William Drew Robeson, a Presbyterian minister who had been born into slavery in North Carolina before escaping in his teens. The younger Robeson began acting in high school, and also excelled at sport. He won an academic scholarship to Rutgers University, which he graduated as class valedictorian in 1919. Robeson was socially conscious from a young age, and became especially concerned with inequality, both racial and economic, in American society. He attended Columbia Law School and worked for a time as a lawyer, but left the legal field behind due to its institutional racism. His talent for acting and singing allowed him to build a career in show business with the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance, and he became especially known for his portrayal of Joe in Show Boat, with his rendition of "Ol' Man River" becoming iconic. He was also one of the first Black leads in American film history. In the 1930s, Robeson's social consciousness expanded, and he became interested in Africanism, anti-imperialism, and socialism, visiting the Soviet Union in 1934. Robeson would later reflect that his treatment in the Soviet Union was so starkly in contrast with the racism he experienced in America that he had felt like a full human being for the first time in his life. He became a left-wing political activist, supporting the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and unionization in the United States. He was closely associated with a number of prominent socialists and members of the Communist Party, and supported Henry Wallace's 1948 Presidential campaign. He was also heavily involved in the early phase of the Civil Rights Movement. Robeson's political activities resulted in a backlash as the Cold War opened. He was blacklisted, forced to appear before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, and his passport was revoked for several years, preventing him from touring. He retained popularity outside of the United States, and he was able to find some success touring in Europe and Australia, where he became the first person to perform at the site of the Sydney Opera House, singing the labor song "Joe Hill" for the workers building it. In poor health for much of his later life, Robeson died in 1976.

"My father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I'm going to stay right here and have a part of it, just like you. And no fascist-minded people like you will drive me from it. Is that clear?"

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Olivia Reingold

Published: Apr 15, 2024

CHICAGO — About 300 anti-war activists crowded into the basement of the Teamsters Union’s headquarters on Saturday to hear organizers from all over the country describe their plans to disrupt the Democratic National Convention this August. Joe Biden’s backing of Israel since Hamas’s October 7 attack has turned these left-wing radicals against their own party.

“It’s really inspiring to see that people are just as enthusiastic, and maybe even more enthusiastic, to march on the DNC as they are to march on the RNC,” says Omar Florez, a Milwaukee-based activist. “We can thank Genocide Joe and our movement for that.”  

But then a man stumbles to the podium, wiping sweat from his forehead. He grabs the microphone to announce that the Islamic regime of Iran has launched missiles and drones heading straight toward Israel.

“They believe that they will be in Palestinian—I don’t call it Israeli—airspace between two and four a.m., which means about two to four hours from now,” he says. “In addition, there are reports of drones having been fired on Israel from Yemen and Iraq.”

The crowd, all wearing black N95s, erupts into applause. Someone in the back lowers their mask to send a celebratory whistle soaring throughout the room.  

The man at the podium, Hatem Abudayyeh, heads the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, “a purported community group which, on information and belief, is an affiliate of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a designated terror organization based in Gaza,” according to a lawsuit over the alleged relations between U.S. advocacy groups and Hamas. 

“This is when this country and the world needs us because the United States is going to, quote unquote, defend the criminal Israeli state,” says Abudayyeh, whose home was raided by the FBI in 2010 as part of an investigation “concerning the material support of terrorism.” 

“We have to assume that the United States is going to try to retaliate against Iran.”

After the boos and calls of “shame” subside, Abudayyeh says it is “incumbent” upon Americans to “stop the United States from expanding this war and hitting Iran.”

“We’ve got to be the strong, powerful anti-war movement that we are,” he says, placing the microphone down and exiting the stage. 

The crowd immediately began chanting, “Hands off Iran.”

A woman in a hot pink gas mask, wielding a matching neon cane and dressed in a “Protect Trans Kids” t-shirt, throws her fist in the air. Nearby, a service poodle is taking a nap under the chair of his owner, who is wearing a leather harness over his t-shirt. Then the group that has joined here from cities across America—Seattle, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles—cheers and claps in celebration. 

Joe Iosbaker, an organizer with the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, which called October 7 a “good turn of events” in its press release about the terrorist attacks, tells me he supports Iran. His organization has since released a statement backing Iran, where citizens gathered to shout “Death to America” during their nation’s strike against Israel Saturday night.

“We demand hands off Iran,” the statement says. “The people have power, and we will exercise it in the streets.” 

Earlier that day, before news of the attack broke, at a “breakout session” on “the anti-war movement,” Shabbir Rizvi, an organizer with Anti-War Committee Chicago, taught participants how to chant “death to Israel” and “death to America” in Farsi. 

“Marg bar Israel,” he chanted, leading a group of about 80 attendees along with him. A man draped in a Soviet flag bearing a gold hammer and sickle clapped his hands. 

A man in a full black denim outfit shouted out behind his N95—“Can we get a ‘marg bar America’?”

“We can get a ‘marg bar America,’ ” Rizvi replied. 

Then Rizvi raised his hand in the air, leading the crowd like a conductor.

“Marg bar America,” they cheered. 

On my way out of the event, I ask a woman smoking a cigarette to fill me in on the latest news regarding Iran’s lobbing of missiles and drones, which were later intercepted with help from forces from France, the U.S., and the UK. Iran said its strike was retaliation for Israel’s hit on the Iranian embassy in Syria earlier this month, which destroyed the consulate building next to the embassy and killed two of Tehran’s top commanders, and that the matter is “concluded”—unless Israel hits back.

“Iran is part of the resistance,” said the woman, who flew in that morning from New Orleans, where she’s been part of an effort to disrupt Israel-bound shipments in her hometown. “Yemen and Iran and Hezbollah, who are also a militant group in Lebanon, and the Syrian government are all parts of the arc of resistance.” 

A smile creeps across her face as she tells me: “They’re part of the arc of resistance because the enemies are Israel and the USA.” 

==

Remember Mahsa Amini? These insane fuckers don't. They've sided with the brutal Islamic Republic of Iran.

They hate our liberal, secular countries and they want to destroy them. They keep telling us who they are. Do you believe them yet?

Revoke citizenship and deport. I wasn't kidding before and I'm still not kidding now.

[workersolidarity]

Kit Klarenberg reporting on a new far-reaching investigation on the CIA's twisted MK Ultra program and its experiments on people of color in the United States.

Answers and accountability is something we'll never get under the Capitalist system, because the Capitalist Class cannot allow any precedent set that allows for holding members of the Capitalist Class accountable for any kind of actions they take, regardless of the harm caused. And in this case, an unprecedented amount of harm was done to Left movements within the communities of people of color in the US as the CIA attempted to use mind control methods to suppress communities of color from organizing radical political organizations.

How sick do you have to be to use political prisoners to experiment with mind control methods? Our Wall Street sponsored Government has NO ethical or moral boundaries they aren't willing to violate to retain their power and control.

Our Capitalist Elites biggest fear is organized resistance to Capitalist control and Revolutionary Socialist movements. By labeling followers of anti-Capitalist organizations and ideologies as mentally ill, our government used this as a Medical excuse to experiment on, harm and suppress Anti-Capitalist groups and communities of color, ravaging those movements and their ability to affect policy as they had begun to do in the 1960's.

"The darkness of MKULTRA lingers still, calling for urgent answers and transparency. America’s Black community deserves nothing less than the full extent of these operations exposed; culprits held accountable, and rightful compensation for survivors. As the shadows of the past stretch into the present, the demand for truth rings louder than ever, and justice becomes an undeniable imperative."

Couldn't have said it better myself. Major thanks to Anthropologist Orisanmi Burton for publishing this incredibly dark report, and Truthout and MPN for reporting on it.

You can read the more in-depth Truthout article Here

[sophie-frm-mars]

Mobilising and organising

I think about this a lot. Kwame Ture said that the difference between mobilising and organising should be properly understood. A protest, march, or rally is mobilising, but it is organising that we need to make real change. To be a good organiser you have to be a good mobiliser, but not all good mobilisers are good organisers. Ture's contrasting examples are Malcolm X (organiser) and MLK (mobiliser) - he says "everywhere that Malcolm went he left a mosque".

Ture also says "sometimes the enemy uses mobilisation to immobilise us!" People easily mobilise around issues, but this doesn't create change. Think of how many well attended massive marches and protests came together the same day as something horrible hit the news, and how often they change nothing fundamentally. People don't mobilise to address fundamental injustice in the same way, or every prison would be dismantled already, every border erased, classes abolished and marginalised peoples liberated. For that, we have to organise.

The Internet, and here I'm largely talking about social media, is constantly used to mobilise, but very rarely used to organise. We use social media to get people to come to protests, we share gofundmes, we hold fundraiser streams. We need to use the Internet to organise, not just to mobilise, and to do that I don't mean that we need to have discord servers for our local antifascist blocs, i mean we need to devise new ways to use the Internet as organisational infrastructure.

On Red Planet we interview organisers every week so that our show serves as a promotional opportunity for orgs and the archives of our episodes double as an educational resource for aspiring organisers. At the same time we bring the conversation back to always keep our eyes on the prize: dual power. How does whatever we're discussing relate back to the construction of a socialist relation between the working class? How can this help people stop deferring responsibility to the state and get them relying on their neighbours instead?

All that is a start, but there's still more we in the online left can do. Black Socialists of America started a map of mutual aid orgs internationally so that people can quickly find orgs near them. That's a great example of building infrastructure to enable the knitting together of a new social fabric.

The American christofascist right wing is engineering a genocide of trans people and through the restriction of bodily autonomy increasingly pushing for the enslavement of women. We won't stop that with fundraiser streams. They will be a part of the fight back, but we need to develop tools that allow more meaningful resistance and allow us to organise to challenge injustice fundamentally.

We need the Internet to be full of these kinds of tools, because the Internet is a beautiful opportunity to do to organising what it's done for so many other social processes, but first we have to stop letting mobilisation immobilise us.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"The most notorious internee held in any of the Canadian [internment] camps was Leon Trotsky. When news reached North America in March 1917 that the Russian tsar, Nicholas II, had abdicated, Trotsky was living in exile in New York City. He immediately arranged to return to his homeland. On March 27 he boarded the Norwegian freighter Christianiafjord with his wife and two sons, bound for Petrograd. Trotsky had been under surveillance in New York where British authorities took note of his departure. The situation in Russia was confused, but the Allies knew that socialists like Trotsky wanted to withdraw Russian troops from the war. It was widely believed that they were enemy agents funded by the Germans to divide the Allied war effort. At Halifax, the British naval commander received orders to board the Christianiafjord when it arrived and to detain Trotsky and the other Russians with whom he was travelling.

On April 1 the freighter steamed into Halifax harbour. Naval officers marched Trotsky and his comrades to jail cells in the Citadel, the imposing stone fortification overlooking the city. Then, while Natalia Sedova Trotskaya and the boys were lodged with a police employee in town, the men were interned in a prisoner-of-war camp, a converted iron foundry at Amherst near the New Brunswick border.

Trotsky was not cowed by his treatment. Quite the opposite: he defiantly petitioned the Russian government and the British prime minister, protesting his illegal detention. Meanwhile, he began to harangue his fellow prisoners with speeches, in fluent German, proclaiming the need for a revolution in Germany. “That month the concentration camp very much resembled a perpetual mass meeting,” he later wrote. To the dismay of officials, he became a hero to the 800 other detainees. He was “by far the most popular man in the whole camp,” the commander reported. Another officer recalled that Trotsky “gave us a lot of trouble at the camp, and if he had stayed there any longer [...] would have made communists of all the German prisoners.”

Trotsky was a citizen of a country with which Great Britain, and therefore Canada, was an ally in the fighting, and he was travelling with perfectly legal permits and visas. His internment was giving Canada a black eye internationally. At rallies in New York and Russia, speakers denounced Canada as a tyranny, no better than the Tsarist autocracy. Finally, after a month in confinement, he won his release. A crowd of cheering prisoners lined his path as he walked to the gate, followed by an impromptu camp band doing its best to play the Internationale. And with that, Leon Trotsky’s sojourn in Canada ended."

- Daniel Francis, Seeing Reds: the Red Scare of 1918-1919, Canada’s First War on Terror. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011. p. 17-18.