21st Century Fascism

[blindpig]

VULGAR ANTICOMMUNISM BY THE EU: They equate Marx's "The Capital" with... Hitler's "Mein Kampf"!



The EU and the Estonian Presidency of the European Council have reached the ultimate limits of political vulgarity and anticommunist distortion of History. The- organised by the Estonian EU Presidency- despicable "conference" in Tallinn proved its role as an unhistorical, hideous forum where the participants tried to equate communism with nazism.

Among the many unhistorical references and efforts to distort the historical truth, the most horrible one came from Goran Lindblad of Sweden, President of the so-called "Platform of European Memory and Conscience". In his speech, Lindblad refered to the importance that the condemnation of all the "totalitarian regimes" has, and added that: "communist ideology in itself was bad, not that something had gone wrong when it was implemented. “Both the texts of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ and Karl Marx include it, the idea to use terror to keep dictatorships in power,” Lindblad, a member of the Swedish Moderate Party, said.


For the record, other participants in this despicable, anticommunist "conference" were: Estonian MEP Tunne Kelam (IRL/EPP), Dr. Olaf Mertelsmann of the University of Tartu, also include Dr. Anna Kaminsky, director of the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship in Germany, Andres Kasekamp, professor at the University of Toronto, Igor Casu, professor at the State University of Moldova, and Dr. Bartosz Dziewanowski-Stefanczyk of the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity in Warsaw.


Despicable anticommunists: Tunne Kelam (left) and Goran Lindblad.

* * *

KKE: The EU's vulgar anticommunism has no bottom.


"The vulgar anticommunism of the EU has no bottom" mentions a statement by the Press Office of the CC of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and continues "the identification of the unprecedented work of Karl Marx "The Capital" with the nazist manifesto "Mein Kampf" of Hitler, was among the vulgar things that were said in the anticommunist fiesta in Estonia".

In another part of the statement, the KKE writes: "This is the proof that the EU constantly strengthens and process her anticommunism, the so-called equation between communism-nazism, which in the end of day justifies the hideous monster of nazism".

The KKE attacks the conservative, opposition New Democracy Party for participating "in this anticommunist drain", but also blames the SYRIZA-ANEL government for its hypocrisy. More specifically, the KKE statement writes:

"The SYRIZA-ANEL government cannot present itself as justified for its decision not to participate in Estonia, not only because it has already legitimize it by its presence in the respective last year's fiest (in Bratislava), but also because it acquits the EU for her anticommunism, which goes hand by hand with the attack on the workers-people's rights.".

https://communismgr.blogspot.gr/2017/08 ... quate.html

[kidoftheblackhole]

This is what we started to discuss on twitter sometime back. Take away ideology and you have nothing left to anchor yourself..and up becomes down, right becomes left, Marx is worse than Hitler..

[Dhalgren]

The Cold War and It's Origins Part 1 1917-1950



The media is currently in the midst of an anti-Russian hysteria that many have dubbed Cold War 2.0. Of course the first cold war never really ended as the wars in Yugoslavia, Chechnya, and even Afghanistan were aimed at Russia as was the relentless NATO expansion. This manufactured panic is a form of psychological warfare that went into high gear during the Sochi Olympics in 2014 as the US was working to launch a fascist coup in Ukraine. Since most ordinary people would be shocked to discover that Nazis had been installed in power in Ukraine an anti-Russian hysteria was launched to discredit and intimidate any possible critics of this criminal policy. Of course this was also the moment that I decided to launch my blog for the purpose of exposing the history and methods of the American Empire from the "Cold War" (or World War 3) to World War 4 (which goes by many names.) The fascist coup in Ukraine resulted in a genocidal civil war when the people of Novorossia (the Donbass region of Ukraine) seceded from Ukraine and to the amazement of the world managed with Russian assistance to smash the NATO backed Ukrainian army and their fascist death squad allies attempt to crush the Novorossiyan revolt. Four years later the new cold war has only intensified and frankly gotten so absurd I feel as if I am living in a satire. Only a few courageous voices like Robert Parry have dared to question the current madness. For a discussion of this new cold war I recommend the excellent "The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia" by Dan Kovalik.


This article however will examine the origins of the first "Cold War." I will be relying on a forgotten classic on the topic "The Cold War and It's Origins" By D.F. Fleming which he wrote to oppose the madness of his own time which like today threatens to plunge the world into a nuclear war which it is unlikely anyone will survive. His book was published in 1961 shortly before the Cuban missile crisis nearly ended the world and also shortly before John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the national security state in broad daylight in front of cheering crowds in Dallas Texas. JFK's crimes were to avoid a nuclear war over Cuba, resisting a massive escalation in Vietnam, and attempting to halt the cold war with Russia. D.F. Fleming actually began writing his monumental work as the post-world war 2 cold war was starting in the late 1940's and was doubtless risking career suicide for daring to write an objective account of events at the height of McCarthyism. Thus it is my pleasure to rescue his name from obscurity. The Myth of the Cold War is that the Soviet Union was attempting to conquer the world while freedom loving America was forced to stop them. Yet as we shall see the last thing the Soviet Union wanted was another world war they had suffered 27 million dead during world war 2 and their only goal was to rebuild after the enormous destruction the nazis wrought. America on the other hand was undamaged save the 250,000 soldiers they lost in the war (7 million Soviet soldiers were killed) and they had just acquired the atom bomb. Far from defending freedom America was busy allying with every fascist it could find and would overthrow countless democracies installing brutal military dictators in the years to come. America's main goal was to stop the people of the world from doing anything to combat the terrible poverty and oppression they lived under. America fought on the side of the rich against the poor and dared to call this democracy despite the fact that the poor are the vast majority of the world and the rich a tiny minority of the planet.

The myths of the original cold war live on and are accepted as true despite the mountains of evidence discrediting these myths. Americans prefer to remember the comforting lies rather then to face the awful truths of their own history. The cold war was in retrospect one of the most successful psychological warfare campaigns in history it aimed to crush dissent at home and revolution abroad. It unleashed fascism at home and abroad. By purging communists from American society it did great damage to the labor, peace, and civil rights movements and created a toothless cowardly american left that slowly but inevitably lead to the completely bankrupt politics of today where no one in the public eye dares to oppose capitalism, imperialism, or even fascism. A world where al Qaeda terrorists receive oscars and Ukrainian fascists are celebrated as champions of democracy.


But let us turn our attention to the origin of this "Cold War" D.F. Fleming begins his history not with the end of World War 2 but much earlier in Tsarist Russia in the years before 1905. He outlines the utter misery and ignorance that the vast masses of Russians were forced to live in. The dirt, the disease, the crowding, the cruelty of those times is difficult for us to imagine. Most Russians had no access to health care or education. Any attempt to demand better pay or working conditions was met with brutal reprisals. Unions were illegal. A spirit of revolution born of utter desperation began to spread. Lenin had only recently split his Bolshevik faction off from the other marxists because he foresaw that only a tightly organized revolutionary party would stand a chance against the Tsar's secret police. The Tsar's expansion of his empire into China and Korea lead to a war with the expanding Japanese empire. The Russian government was so corrupt the troops supplies never seemed to arrive and the war resulted in a humiliating defeat. The secret police created their own fake opposition so that they could control it. However conditions were so bad one of their agents a priest Father Gapon was forced to disobey orders and lead a massive demonstration begging the czar for help in a petition. Instead of help the Tsar ordered a massacre. This sparked the 1905 Revolution. Western "Democracies" sent the Tsar Billions in loans so that he could brutally suppress this revolution since they owned much of the Russian economy and didn't want Russia's people interfering with their profits. The Tsar unleashed his proto-fascist "Black Hundreds" death squads who massacred the workers and the peasants along with any jews or "subversives" they could lay their hands on. The Tsar was forced to allow a parliament but broke most of his promises for democratic reform. On the eve of world war 1 nearly ten years later revolution again threatened as the country was paralyzed by massive strikes. However the Tsar foolishly entered the war despite the fact his regime was already tottering.


World war 1 was a disaster for Russia it had some success against the Austro-Hungarian empire but was no match for the crack German troops. The Germans with their modern artillery were able to obliterate the Russian armies their guns were so powerful they could bury the Russians alive from a distance and millions of soldiers perished. The Russian Officers were so cruel to their men that mutiny was rampant. Again because of corruption and industrial backwardness they were ill trained and poorly supplied. Despite this they did make an important contribution to the allied victory but by 1917 Russia was facing a complete collapse. The women of St. Petersburg sparked a revolution when they marched demanding bread and instead of massacring the people the troops mutinied. However this initial revolution was quickly hijacked by the new provisional government although the Tsar was forced to resign. The people of Russia desperately needed peace and some relief for their incredible poverty. The new provisional government was committed to continuing the war and delayed putting any socialist reforms into place. It also faced competition from the "Soviets" which meant councils of soldiers workers and peasants. Lenin newly returned from exile saw an opportunity to turn Russia's liberal democratic revolution into a communist revolution willing to carry out the will of the people. He won over the Russian people with the slogans "Land, Peace, and Bread" and "All power to the Soviets" Even many in his own party thought this was impossible but of course by November 7 of 1917 only a few months later the Russian October Revolution had succeeded in seizing power.


This is when the cold war began both their former enemies the Germans and their former allies Britain, France, and the US along with 10 other countries were now bent on destroying the Russian Revolution. Luckily for Lenin World War 1 was still ongoing and the Germans main priority was to make peace with Russia so that it could send it's forces to the western front. They knew Russia was weak and so demanded a large amount of Russian territory in exchange for peace. Thanks to Trotsky's bungling they were also able to seize huge amounts of extra territory that had belonged to Russian empire in the Baltic, Poland, and Ukraine which the Germans seized after Trotsky told them he would neither make peace nor war with them. Russia was forced to make peace with the humiliating treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Britain and France were momentarily distracted but provided funding to a series of would be fascist Russian dictators or "White Generals" as they were then called. Men like Generals Denikin and Kolchak They committed horrendous atrocities and also brought untold disaster and suffering to the men under their command when each of them failed in turn. To give only one example imagine the disaster faced by the men who were forced to retreat without supplies back into Siberia. Once World War 1 Ended the whole world was free to unite in attempting to destroy Socialist Russia. They not only hoped to destroy the Revolution each also sought to balkanize the country and seize huge territories as loot. The Japanese sought to seize Siberia. France sought to seize Odessa and Crimea. Britain Sought to seize the rich oil fields in the black sea region near present day Chechnya. Germany installed fascist puppets in the Baltic. Poland seized a huge portion of Russian territory. Encircled and invaded on every side amazingly the communists were victorious and regained control of most of their territory. It was one of the most glorious victories in human history.

http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/ ... l?spref=tw

This is a very good piece. Too long to post it all, but well worth going to the site. If this has already been posted somewhere, here, feel free to delete.

[kidoftheblackhole]

I haven't seen it before; interesting.

[Allen17]

From the New York Times, of all places! (bolding mine.)

I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.

Looking back from that perspective, we can now see a history that is indeed unsettling — but also unsettlingly familiar. Consider, for example, an essay published in 1926 by Hiram Evans, the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, in the exceedingly mainstream North American Review. His subject was the decline of “Americanism.” Evans claimed to speak for an abused white majority, “the so-called Nordic race,” which, “with all its faults, has given the world almost the whole of modern civilization.” Evans, a former dentist, proposed that his was “a movement of plain people,” and acknowledged that this “lays us open to the charge of being hicks and ‘rubes’ and ‘drivers of secondhand Fords.’ ” But over the course of the last generation, he wrote, these good people “have found themselves increasingly uncomfortable, and finally deeply distressed,” watching a “moral breakdown” that was destroying a once-great nation. First, there was “confusion in thought and opinion, a groping and hesitancy about national affairs and private life alike, in sharp contrast to the clear, straightforward purposes of our earlier years.” Next, they found “the control of much of our industry and commerce taken over by strangers, who stacked the cards of success and prosperity against us,” and ultimately these strangers “came to dominate our government.” The only thing that would make America great again, as it were, was “a return of power into the hands of everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualized, but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanized average citizens of old stock.”

This “Second Klan” (the first was formed during Reconstruction) scrambles our pre-Trump sense of what right-wing ideology does and does not comprise. (Its doctrines, for example, included support for public education, to weaken Catholic parochial schools.) The Klan also put the predations of the international banking class at the center of its rhetoric. Its worldview resembles, in fact, the right-wing politics of contemporary Europe — a tradition, heretofore judged foreign to American politics, called “herrenvolk republicanism,” that reserved social democracy solely for the white majority. By reaching back to the reactionary traditions of the 1920s, we might better understand the alliance between the “alt-right” figures that emerged as fervent Trump supporters during last year’s election and the ascendant far-right nativist political parties in Europe.

None of this history is hidden. Indeed, in the 1990s, a rich scholarly literature emerged on the 1920s Klan and its extraordinary, and decidedly national, influence. (One hotbed of Klan activity, for example, was Anaheim, Calif. McGirr’s “Suburban Warriors” mentions this but doesn’t discuss it; neither did I in my own account of Orange County conservatism in “Before the Storm.” Again, it just didn’t seem relevant to the subject of the modern conservative movement.) The general belief among historians, however, was that the Klan’s national influence faded in the years after 1925, when Indiana’s grand dragon, D.C. Stephenson, who served as the de facto political boss for the entire state, was convicted of murdering a young woman.

But the Klan remained relevant far beyond the South. In 1936 a group called the Black Legion, active in the industrial Midwest, burst into public consciousness after members assassinated a Works Progress Administration official in Detroit. The group, which considered itself a Klan enforcement arm, dominated the news that year. The F.B.I. estimated its membership at 135,000, including a large number of public officials, possibly including Detroit’s police chief. The Associated Press reported in 1936 that the group was suspected of assassinating as many as 50 people. In 1937, Humphrey Bogart starred in a film about it. In an informal survey, however, I found that many leading historians of the right — including one who wrote an important book covering the 1930s — hadn’t heard of the Black Legion.

Stephen H. Norwood, one of the few historians who did study the Black Legion, also mined another rich seam of neglected history in which far-right vigilantism and outright fascism routinely infiltrated the mainstream of American life. The story begins with Father Charles Coughlin, the Detroit-based “radio priest” who at his peak reached as many as 30 million weekly listeners. In 1938, Coughlin’s magazine, Social Justice, began reprinting “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” a forged tract about a global Jewish conspiracy first popularized in the United States by Henry Ford. After presenting this fictitious threat, Coughlin’s paper called for action, in the form of a “crusade against the anti-Christian forces of the red revolution” — a call that was answered, in New York and Boston, by a new organization, the Christian Front. Its members were among the most enthusiastic participants in a 1939 pro-Hitler rally that packed Madison Square Garden, where the leader of the German-American Bund spoke in front of an enormous portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas.

The Bund took a mortal hit that same year — its leader was caught embezzling — but the Christian Front soldiered on. In 1940, a New York chapter was raided by the F.B.I. for plotting to overthrow the government. The organization survived, and throughout World War II carried out what the New York Yiddish paper The Day called “small pogroms” in Boston and New York that left Jews in “mortal fear” of “almost daily” beatings. Victims who complained to authorities, according to news reports, were “insulted and beaten again.” Young Irish-Catholic men inspired by the Christian Front desecrated nearly every synagogue in Washington Heights. The New York Catholic hierarchy, the mayor of Boston and the governor of Massachusetts largely looked the other way.

Why hasn’t the presence of organized mobs with backing in powerful places disturbed historians’ conclusion that the American right was dormant during this period? In fact, the “far right” was never that far from the American mainstream. The historian Richard Steigmann-Gall, writing in the journal Social History, points out that “scholars of American history are by and large in agreement that, in spite of a welter of fringe radical groups on the right in the United States between the wars, fascism never ‘took’ here.” And, unlike in Europe, fascists did not achieve governmental power. Nevertheless, Steigmann-Gall continues, “fascism had a very real presence in the U.S.A., comparable to that on continental Europe.” He cites no less mainstream an organization than the American Legion, whose “National Commander” Alvin Owsley proclaimed in 1922, “the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States.” A decade later, Chicago named a thoroughfare after the Fascist military leader Italo Balbo. In 2011, Italian-American groups in Chicago protested a movement to rename it.

In their 1987 book, “Right Turn,” the political scientists Joel Rogers and Thomas Ferguson presented public-opinion data demonstrating that Reagan’s crusade against activist government, which was widely understood to be the source of his popularity, was not, in fact, particularly popular For example, when Reagan was re-elected in 1984, only 35 percent of voters favored significant cuts in social programs to reduce the deficit. Much excellent scholarship, well worth revisiting in the age of Trump, suggests an explanation for Reagan’s subsequent success at cutting back social programs in the face of hostile public opinion: It was business leaders, not the general public, who moved to the right, and they became increasingly aggressive and skilled in manipulating the political process behind the scenes.

But another answer hides in plain sight. The often-cynical negotiation between populist electioneering and plutocratic governance on the right has long been not so much a matter of policy as it has been a matter of show business. The media scholar Tim Raphael, in his 2009 book, “The President Electric: Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Performance,” calls the three-minute commercials that interrupted episodes of The General Electric Theater — starring Reagan and his family in their state-of-the-art Pacific Palisades home, outfitted for them by G.E. — television’s first “reality show.” For the California voters who soon made him governor, the ads created a sense of Reagan as a certain kind of character: the kindly paterfamilias, a trustworthy and nonthreatening guardian of the white middle-class suburban enclave. Years later, the producers of “The Apprentice” carefully crafted a Trump character who was the quintessence of steely resolve and all-knowing mastery. American voters noticed. Linda Lucchese, a Trump convention delegate from Illinois who had never previously been involved in politics, told me that she watched “The Apprentice” and decided that Trump would make a perfect president. “All those celebrities,” she told me: “They showed him respect.”

It is a short leap from advertising and reality TV to darker forms of manipulation. Consider the parallels since the 1970s between conservative activism and the traditional techniques of con men. Direct-mail pioneers like Richard Viguerie created hair-on-fire campaign-fund-raising letters about civilization on the verge of collapse. One 1979 pitch warned that “federal and state legislatures are literally flooded with proposed laws that are aimed at total confiscation of firearms from law-abiding citizens.” Another, from the 1990s, warned that “babies are being harvested and sold on the black market by Planned Parenthood clinics.” Recipients of these alarming missives sent checks to battle phony crises, and what they got in return was very real tax cuts for the rich. Note also the more recent connection between Republican politics and “multilevel marketing” operations like Amway (Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, is the wife of Amway’s former president and the daughter-in-law of its co-founder); and how easily some of these marketing schemes shade into the promotion of dubious miracle cures (Ben Carson, secretary of housing and urban development, with “glyconutrients”; Mike Huckabee shilling for a “solution kit” to “reverse” diabetes; Trump himself taking on a short-lived nutritional-supplements multilevel marketing scheme in 2009). The dubious grifting of Donald Trump, in short, is a part of the structure of conservative history.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/maga ... wrong.html

Now, let's continue to broaden this history and the analysis of said history, to capitalism - because fascism and capitalism, of course, have such a strong, uh, relationship, to one another...

[blindpig]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/maga ... wrong.html

Now, let's continue to broaden this history and the analysis of said history, to capitalism - because fascism and capitalism, of course, have such a strong, uh, relationship, to one another...[\quote]

THE NYT doth protest too much, it prefers its fascism overseas, or if domestic, subtle, at least not unsightly. With Trump three quarters of their ill will is not about policy but appearances, the emperor is indeed naked and they hate that in their avatar.

[Allen17]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/maga ... wrong.html

Now, let's continue to broaden this history and the analysis of said history, to capitalism - because fascism and capitalism, of course, have such a strong, uh, relationship, to one another...[\quote]

THE NYT doth protest too much, it prefers its fascism overseas, or if domestic, subtle, at least not unsightly. With Trump three quarters of their ill will is not about policy but appearances, the emperor is indeed naked and they hate that in their avatar.

Indeed...

[blindpig]

The Baltic Holocaust and Russophobia
by Frank Lee


Vilnius, Latvia, 23 June 2017 Right Wing Latvian Nationalists/Russphobes on the March


Vilnius, Latvia, 23 June 2017 Right Wing Latvian Nationalists/Russphobes on the March
On 23 June 2017 in the Parliament Square of Vilnius,

On 23 June 2017 in the Parliament Square of Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, an official celebration of the uprising of 23 June 1943 against Soviet rule took place. The event was orchestrated mainly by veterans of the Lithuanian Freedom Fighters Association, a far-right militia group. During these celebrations an exhibit of more than 12 posters were hung which presented the anti-Soviet insurrection one that “drove terror into the Bolshevik occupying army and the lackeys of the occupation forces.”

Some historical context is needed here.

In June 1941, Hitler had launched a surprise attack on the Soviet Union, overrunning the Baltics in a few weeks. As documented by eyewitness testimony, photographs, and Nazi records, the Christian majority welcomed the Germans as liberators and right-wing paramilitary groups began massacring their Jewish neighbours before German rule had even been firmly established. Over the next three years of German occupation, around 200,000 Jews, more than 95 percent of Lithuania’s Jewish population, were murdered—a more complete destruction than befell any other European country. In an of inversion of Denmark, the nation where massive local resistance to the Nazi occupiers saved the lives of most Danish Jews, in Lithuania, zealous local collaboration ensured near-complete extermination. One of the only ways for a Jew to survive the Holocaust in Lithuania—the deadliest place on a deadly continent—was the way Yitzhak Arad, a Jewish anti-fascist did: as a partisan fighting the Nazis and their collaborators in the forests.

Thus the ‘lackeys’ (as referred to above) comprised the usual target for Nazi extermination policy: Jews, Russians, Communists, Gypsies or anybody who didn’t co-operate with the collaborationist Latvian pro-Nazi forces or the German Einsatzgruppen, Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary death squads, both of whom were responsible for mass killings. In one incident thousands of Jewish families desperate to avoid capture were forced back by the Lithuanian partisans, arrested by the Lithuanian Activist Front, held in concentration camps until were executed without trial at Kaunas VII Fort during June/July 1941

Episodes such as this represent a little cameo forming part of the history of Lithuania during WW2– a history is generally unknown outside of the West. Sadly, such events were not restricted to Lithuania, but were also a similarly squalid human rights record in Latvia and Estonia. Like the western Ukraine these were collaborationist states who were only too eager to welcome their German Nazi brethren.

The situation in Latvia also followed the same pattern. Estimates suggest that approx. 75,000 Latvian Jews fell into Nazi hands. Moreover, even prior to the persecution of Latvian Jews by the German Nazi authorities, they had suffered anti-Semitic excesses at the hands of the Latvian militias. Chief among these were members of the Azsgargi para-military group and the fascist anti-Semitic organization – Perkonkrusts – which later collaborated with the Nazis in their annihilation of the Jewish community. During the October pogrom in Riga the Latvian Auxiliary Police, all the cities synagogues were destroyed, and 400 Jews were killed. According to German SS records some 38,000 Jews had been murdered by the end of December 1941.

By the beginning of 1942 Jews were imported from German home and militarily occupied territories and incarcerated in various concentration camps – the most notorious being Salaspils and Kaiswerwald. Conditions were so bad that many died of disease and hunger.

It could be said that the German SS authorities to a large extent outsourced their Baltic holocaust to local collaborationist Latvian nationalists who undertook their allotted role with considerable alacrity.

Not to be outdone Estonia had its own mini-holocaust. Given that the original Jewish population of Estonia was much smaller than either Lithuania or Latvia the numbers of Jews murdered was correspondingly reduced. Nonetheless Units of the Eesti Omakaitse (Estonian Home Guard; approximately 1000 to 1200 men) were directly involved in criminal acts, taking part in the round-up of 200 Roma people and 950 Jews. Units of Estonian Auxiliary Police participated in the extermination of Jews in the Pskov region of Russia and provided guards for concentration camps for Jews and Soviet POWs.

Shameful! Barbaric! No, not a bit of it. Celebrations of indigenous neo-Nazi and SS reunions have been ongoing events in the Baltics since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Baltic states’ integration into the EU/NATO bloc. (Well how could we leave such decent chaps outside NATO’s warm and protective embrace!?) In addition to the celebrations in Lithuania, there was earlier in the year – 16 March 2017- a march through the Latvian capital, Riga, in honour of the Latvian Waffen-SS Volunteer Legion [1]. International protests failed to prevent this event from taking place just as they failed earlier. Marches honouring the Latvian SS-men have been a regular event in Riga since 1990. In 1998, the Latvian government even went so far as to make that date a national holiday.

Suffice it to say that Russophobia is akin to a state religion in the Baltics (as is also the case in Poland and Ukraine). This is evident in both theory and practise. In a February 2012 referendum, Latvians roundly rejected Russian as an official second language. It is analogous to what happened in Ukraine after Yanukovich fled the country: The parliament overturned a law that would have granted official status to the Russian language. It was one of the post-revolution developments that seemed to alarm Moscow.

In Estonia, things are if anything even worse. Ethnic Russians are somewhere between one-fifth and one-quarter of the population. And yet, after Estonian independence in 1991, they were not given citizenship, even if they were born there. Russians who weren’t living in Estonia before Soviet times are given a grey passport connoting their official status as “aliens.” They can’t vote in national elections and have trouble finding work. To get citizenship, they must pass an Estonian language exam. (Estonian, which is not an Indo-European language but an Ugro-Finnic one, is notoriously difficult, with 14 cases.) The Language Inspectorate, which Russia Today derisively labelled “the language police,” performs spot checks on bureaucrats and teachers to make sure they know Estonian. If they fail the test, they lose their jobs. This is little more than a system of apartheid as was once evident in South Africa and is still the case in Palestine.

In the world of pop music there are so-called Tribute bands. Musical acts who appropriate and perform songs and sport other trappings from world famous groups. Thus, we have a Beatles tribute band, an Elton John tribute band…and so forth. In the case of the Baltics we have Tribute Nazism complete with songs, flags, symbols and the rest of the fascist bric-a-brac.

This being the political situation it should come as no surprise that the ethnic Russian population has fallen from 1,726,000 in 1989 to 1,052,520 this was the figure in the last consensus which took place in 2011. This raises further issues. Namely, the record of the Baltics’ membership of the EU. Whatever happened to the golden land of EU milk and honey and the promises held out to the Baltic populations by the EU? In short, they were sold – I can’t put it politely – a crock of shit. Economic and social conditions in the Baltic nations are among the worse in the whole Eurozone.

The reality: The latest Eurostat report on the situation in Lithuania shows that up to 29% of the inhabitants are living on the verge of poverty, with the situation remaining unchanged for eight consecutive years. At the same time, Lithuania is among the top five states of the EU where people are being employed for meagre salaries.

The sad reality of this trend is evidenced by historical records showing an unprecedented drop in the population of Lithuania, that fell from the level of 3.7 million back in 1990 to 2.8 million in 2016, a drop of no less than 25%. Income inequality and the striking poverty of some Lithuanian residents is only getting worse over the years, putting Lithuania in the list of poorest EU states. The same inexorable population decline is also evident in Latvia. After obtaining independence from the Soviet bloc in 1991, the population of Latvia has been diminishing annually with the rate of 23,000 people a year. These frightening figures were unveiled last March by a professor of the University of Latvia, demographer Peteris Zvidriņš who would note that the sad reality is that Latvia loses some small town every two weeks.

In raw figures, that is 55 people a day, or 1,650 people a month. Another Latvian demographer, who heads a local office of the International Organization for Migration of the United Nations, Ilmar Mezhs, has recently told Skaties.lv that most of those who are leaving Latvia are not planning to go back. Referring to the forecasts of Eurostat, Mezhs suggested that in sixty years in the place of 2.7 million people who had previously resided in Latvia, one would find less than a million people still dwelling in this country. According to preliminary reports, the country’s population has already been reduced to 1.946 million people. Latvia has been plagued by high mortality rates along with the massive exodus of its people since 1991.

If this downward, demographic trajectory continues there is no possible future for these states, at least on present policies, since these policies are the problem. Any coherent national strategy would have to involve a break with the West and NATO/EU, a normalization of diplomacy and the establishment of trade links with Russia. But of course, this is completely taboo; Russia is the eternal enemy; the pervasiveness of this a pernicious dogma is comparable to heroin addiction, and is just as destructive. Such is the poisoned chalice of Russophobia. Sup it up and enjoy. It couldn’t happen to nicer people.

[1] During WW2 some 150,000 thousand Latvians served on the side of the III Reich. The served in the so-called Volunteer Legion of the SS consisting of the 15th and 19th Grenadier Divisions of the SS (or first and second Latvian Divisions), the Latvia Luftwaffe Legion German Divisions and Police battalions. They were responsible for many war crimes.

https://off-guardian.org/2017/10/28/the ... ssophobia/

[blindpig]

From Warsaw with hate: Fascist and neo-Nazi groups marched in the streets of Poland's capital

Poland is the country where Communists are being persecuted for their activity and ideology by the bourgeois state's mechanisms, the Communist Party faces every kind of repression by the government (which demolishes Soviet monuments) and where fascists, racists and neo-Nazis march in the streets, spreading their poison of hate! This is capitalism and EU's Poland.

According to news agencies, an estimated ten thousand far-right nationalists marched in Poland’s capital city of Warsaw on Saturday, dwarfing the official celebrations and casting a pall on the country's Independence Day commemoration.

The far-right... ‘We Want God' march, while just one of several public events marking Poland's independence in 1918, was by far the largest and loudest, with participants traveling from around the world to march in solidarity with anti-immigrant, racist and, in many cases, fascist causes.

Prior to the nationalist march, Polish President Andrzej Duda and European Union President Donald Tusk — a former Polish prime minister himself — attended a much smaller formal state ceremony.

The presence of the far-right in Warsaw was said to be the largest in recent memory, eclipsing the official state commemorative events, according to Abcnews.com. The annual march, initiated in 2009, appears to be the most popular global celebration of racism, and has consistently grown in size each year, cited by the New York Times.

Many white supremacist marchers waved xenophobic banners encouraging a growing racial divide in Europe that follows the massive influx of north African refugees fleeing several US-led ‘color revolutions,' notably those in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, as well as an enormous and ongoing human rights crisis in Syria.

Calling for a ‘White Europe of brotherly nations,' marchers chanted racist slogans, including anti-Semitic calls to "remove Jewry from power," cited by the Daily Mail.

Occurring at dusk and continuing into the later hours, marchers carried Christian symbols and red torches that ominously lit up the city, while red flares and firecrackers created a warlike urban scene.



Banners displaying the far-right 1930s falanga symbol were held aloft by many marchers, as well as a diverse array of posters, including those claiming that all Muslim immigrants are terrorists; same-sex marriage denouncements; and in support of the anti-Semitic National Radical Camp, a pre World War II group historically espousing extreme nationalist sentiments.

According to Russia Today, about 6,000 policemen were deployed to keep public order throughout the city. Warsaw seen a number of marches and events, such as a counter-protest organized by the anti-fascist movement. Around 1,500 people attended that rally which comprised members from a dozen or so left-wing organizations.

Holding banners with the wordings: “For your freedom and ours,” “Women against fascism,” “Nationalism is a disease,”and “Class struggle, not national,” activists were on the streets to counter nationalism, racism, sexism and other kinds of hatred.

https://communismgr.blogspot.gr/2017/11 ... eo_13.html

[blindpig]

The USA, European Union and Ukraine denied to condemn Nazism at the UN General Assembly



Hiding behind the pretext of "freedom of speech", the United States- accompanied by Ukraine- voted against a resolution condemning the glorification of Nazism introduced to the Third Committee of the U.N. General Assembly by the Russian Federation.

The resolution was approved by a recorded vote of 125 in favor to 2 against, with 51 abstentions.

Among the abstentions are the countries of the European Union (including Greece), Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Turkey and Libya.

Following the draft’s introduction, the United States representative proposed an amendment to the text that would change all sections deemed to violate- according to the US- individual freedoms of speech, thought, expression and association. The amendment was rejected by a recorded vote of 81 against, to 3 in favour (Israel, Ukraine, United States), with 73 abstentions.
Speaking after the draft, as a whole, was approved by a vote of 125 in favour to 2 against (Ukraine, United States), with 51 abstentions, several States commended efforts to combat Nazism, yet expressed concern over the scope of the draft.

Showing the EU's hypocrisy, Estonia’s delegate, on behalf of the European Union, said all contemporary forms of racism should be addressed in an impartial manner! We must remember that the government of Estonia- like other Baltic countries- have a leading role in glorifying Nazism during the last years, by honoring the Waffen-SS, organizing anticommunist fiestas and distorting history under the auspices of the European Union.

No matter how hard they try to distort history, to glorify Nazism-Fascism and vilify Socialism-Communism, the historical truth is one and only: The Soviet Red Army and the peoples' antifascist resistance crushed Nazism in WW2.



https://communismgr.blogspot.gr/2017/11 ... raine.html