Why are tankies so blind to what they’re doing? How can they worship dictators like the Kim dynasty, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Castro, Maduro, and vanguards like the CPSU?

It doesn’t make sense, if you want the working class to be free, why are you idolizing authoritarian rulers?

What the hell is happening here? This blind devotion and cult-like behavior is downright insane.

Visiting the #US is now becoming an exercise in all the fear and bureaucratic red tape that former #USSR states had until recently.

Today in Labor History April 13, 1953: CIA Director Allen Dulles launched the MKUltra mind control program. The program ran from 1953 to 1973. It involved giving human subjects LSD and other drugs, often without their knowledge. Then, researchers would try to “weaken” their minds and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. Over 7,000 U.S. war veterans were unwitting test subjects, as well as many Canadian and U.S. civilians. The program was a continuation of Nazi mind-control experiments, which utilized mescaline against Jews and Soviet prisoners, hoping it could be exploited as a “truth” serum. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor of the CIA, recruited many of these Nazi torturers in the wake of World War II to exploit their knowledge and research. MKUltra was headed by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who later devised plans to kill Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar, and saturating his shoes with radioactive thallium to make his beard fall out. He also tried to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, Prime Minister of Congo, with poison. Several well-known liberals and radicals knowingly participated in MKUltra and its OSS predecessors, either as test subjects (e.g., Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Hunter), or as researchers (e.g., anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson). Others who have been alleged to have been victims or volunteers include Sirhan Sirhan, Ted Kaczyinski, Charles Manson, and Whitey Bulger.

For a really fascinating look at Margaret Mead's and Gregory Bateson’s exploration with hallucinogens and their connection to MKUltra, check out the recent book, Tripping on Utopia, by Benjamin Breen. And for a truly amazing documentary on the 1961 CIA-supported coup in Congo, check out the 2024 documentary, “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.” But the film is really about so much more than the coup. It covers Cold War machinations, propaganda, and covert operations in the early 1960s; the superpowers’ jockeying for control of puppet regimes and spheres of influence in the global south; the Pan-African movement; racism in the U.S., the Civil Rights movement, and the repression against it; and, of course, jazz music, including tons of interviews and live footage of Lumumba, Ghanian president and revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah, activist and writer Andree Madeleine Blouin, Malcolm X, Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Miriam Makeba, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, surrealist artist Rene Magritte.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #cia #mindcontrol #torture #lsd #mkultra #castro #nazis #oss #allenginsberg #lumumba #malcolmx #coltrane #jazz #imperialism #kenkesey #margaretmead #charlesmanson #mescaline #castro #soviet #coldwar #books #nonfiction #ussr #communism #film #documentary @bookstadon

And now this! Welcome to the new #USSR. #snitch on your colleagues.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/state-tells-employees-report-one-162428741.html

What about anti-#Muslim bias? And anti-#Hindu bias? And anti-#Buddhist bias? These criminals #trash the #constitution daily and the #GOP / #MAGA are ok with it; rather they cheer it on. GOP is now the embodiment of everything anti-#American. Oh, how the party of #Lincoln has #fallen!

While freely conceding that the Trumpublican regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the American people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

Building a Revolutionary Movement | "Speech in Defense of the Tactics of the Comintern" (1921) by Lenin

#socialism #socialist #communism #communist #marxism #marxist #marxismleninism #marxistleninist #ussr #sovietunion #history #politics #ultraleftism #anarchism #anarchist

https://youtu.be/LP00TPpTTRg

Good morning to readers; #Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands.

In the #USSR, tattoos were popular amongst prisoners and highly stigmatised.

Since 2022, tattoos, for people like our colleague Mariana, have become a way of taking pride in Ukrainian identity and standing up to #Russia.

“Ours” or One of “Theirs”?

Nino Aivazishvili-Gehne (#LeibnizIOS) explores post-Soviet identities and their political implications among people from the former USSR in Bavaria, reflecting on her personal experiences during fieldwork as a social anthropologist.

https://ostblog.hypotheses.org/7696

Talked with dad yesterday and the first thing he asked me was "what does our leader want with the zoos..?" So I had to tell him that there was something ideologically wrong with the national zoo (apparently). He said "there's also something about the museums?" Yes, our leader is not happy with the ideological purity at various Smithsonian museums. Dad said "oh man .... Back to USSR!"

We also talked about how the president wants to run the Kennedy center and dad brought up how Stalin was *very* involved with the opera and ballet in USSR, and that every new movie that was released had to get his approval.

So yea, ideological purity.

The maga guys are so afraid of "socialism"/"communism", yet their BS makes people who actually lived under those regimes shake their heads and say "here we go again".

It almost makes me wonder whether some of these maga people would have been very enthusiastic censors and agents of the Soviet state! Snitching on people and happily turning them in.

Today in Labor History March 29, 1951: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage. They were executed at Sing Sing in 1953. The Rosenberg’s sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol were adopted by Abel Meeropol, the composer of “Strange Fruit,” (made famous by Billie Holiday). The sons maintained their parents’ innocence. However, after the fall of the Soviet Union, decoded Soviet cables showed that their father had, in fact, collaborated, but that their mother was innocent. They continued to fight for the mother’s pardon, but Obama refused to grant it. The Rosenberg’s sons were among the last students to attend the anarchist Modern School, in Lakewood, New Jersey, before it finally shut its doors in 1958.

The Modern School movement began in 1901, in Barcelona, Spain, when Francisco Ferrer opened his Escuela Moderna. It was one of the very first Spanish schools to be fully secular, co-educational, and open to all students, regardless of class. His ideas were so popular that 40 more Modern Schools opened in Barcelona in just a few years, while 80 other schools adopted his textbooks. In 1909, there were mass protests and a General Strike against Spanish intervention in Morocco. The state responded with a week of terror and repression, during which they slaughtered over 600 workers and falsely executed Ferrer as an instigator of the protests. His execution led to worldwide protests. Modern Schools started to pop up outside of Spain, inspired by his original Escuela Moderna, including 20 in the U.S.

For more on the Modern School movement, read my article: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2022/04/30/the-modern-school-movement/

Let someone born in the Soviet Union explain it to you:

There is no end goal.
There only one single moving current goal
which is to consolidate and hold on to power.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNdRKyhJa/
#russia #ussr #power #trump #maga #fascism

always listen to @mariaressa.bsky.social #autocracy #ussr #philippines #media #facebook #broligarchs @weeklyshowpodcast.bsky.social

Jon Stewart & Maria Ressa On t...

Lying awake my wandering mind associated the #Communist newspaper of the #USSR named #Pravda, which commonly translates as #Truth, with the #neoFascist in the Whitehouse naming his media platform Truth.

It's interesting how the principles and values play out in reality.

"What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening" - #Trump (2018)

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command" - #GeorgeOrwell, #1984 (1949)

Today in Labor History March 23, 1988: Angolan and Cuban forces defeated South Africa in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale. The battle started in August, 1987. In addition to Cubans, volunteers from the USSR, Vietnam, the African National Congress and SWAPO joined the People’s Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola (FAPLA) in the Angolan Civil War. It was the largest battle in Africa since World War II. Several thousand died on both sides, including citizens of South Africa, Cuba, and the USSR

Today in Labor History March 23, 1918: 101 IWW members went on trial in Chicago for opposing World War I and for violating the Espionage Act. In September, 1917, 165 IWW leaders were arrested for conspiring to subvert the draft and encourage desertion. Their trial lasted five months, the longest criminal trial in American history up to that time. The jury found them all guilty. The judge sentenced Big Bill Haywood and 14 others to 20 years in prison. 33 others were given 10 years each. They were also fined a total of $2,500,000. The trial virtually destroyed the IWW. Haywood jumped bail and fled to the USSR, where he remained until his death 10 years later.

Typical street scene in 1991 USSR.