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lilithism1848 · 8 months

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Atrocities US committed against AFRICA

In early 2017, the US began conducting drone strikes in Somalia against Al Shabab militants. An attack on July 16th killed 8 people.

In 1998, the US bombed the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, killing one employee and wounding 11. It was the largest pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, producing medicine both for human and veterinary use. The US had acted on false evidence of a VX nerve agent from a single soil sample, and later used a false witness to cover for the attack. It was the only pharmaceutical factory in Africa not under US control.

In June 1982, with the help of CIA money and arms, Hissene Habre , dubbed Africa’s Pinochet, takes power in Chad. His secret police, use methods of torture including the burning the body of the detainee with incandescent objects, spraying gas into their eyes, ears and nose, forced swallowing of water, and forcing the mouths of detainees around the exhaust pipes of running cars. Habré’s government also periodically engaged in ethnic cleansing against groups such as the Sara, Hadjerai and the Zaghawa, killing and arresting group members en masse when it was perceived that their leaders posed a threat to the regime. Human Rights Watch claimed that Habre was responsible for thousands of killings. In 2001, while living in Senegal, he was almost tried for crimes committed by him in Chad. However, a court there blocked these proceedings. Then human rights people decided to pursue the case in Belgium, because some of Habre’s torture victims lived there. The U.S., in June 2003, told Belgium that it risked losing its status as host to NATO’s headquarters if it allowed such a legal proceeding to happen. So the result was that the law that allowed victims to file complaints in Belgium for atrocities committed abroad was repealed. However, two months later a new law was passed which made special provision for the continuation of the case against Habre. In May 2016 he was found guilty of human-rights abuses, including rape, sexual slavery and ordering the killing of 40,000 people, and sentenced to life in prison.

In the 1980s, Reagan maintains a close relationship with the Apartheid South african government, called constructive engagement, while secretly funding it in the hopes of creating a bulwark of anti-communism and preventing a marxist party from taking power, as happened in angola. Later on, in the wars against Apartheid in South Africa and Angola, in which cuban and anti-apartheid forces fought the white south african government, the US supplied south africa with nuclear weapons via Israel.

In 1975, Henry Kissinger launches a CIA-backed war in Angola, backing the brutal anti-communist leader of UNITAS, Jonas Savimbi, against Agostinho Neto and his Marxist-Leninst MPLA party, creating a civil war lasting for 30 years. The CIA financed a covert invasion via neighboring Zaire and a drive on the Angolan capital by the U.S. ally, South Africa. Congress continues to fund UNITAS, and their south-african apartheid allies until the late 1980s. By the end of the war, more than 500,000 people had died and over one million had been internally displaced.

In 1966, a CIA-backed military coup overthrows he widely popular Pan-Africanist and Marxist leader Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, inviting the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to take a lead role in managing the economy. With this reversal, accentuated by the expulsion of immigrants and a new willingness to negotiate with apartheid South Africa, Ghana lost a good deal of its stature in the eyes of African nationalists.

In 1965, a CIA-backed military coup installs Mobutu Sese Seko, described as the “archetypal African dictator” in Congo. The hated and repressive Mobutu exploits his desperately poor country for billions.

In 1962, a tip from a CIA spy in South Africa lead to the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, due to his pro-USSR leanings. This began his 27-year-long imprisonment.

In 1961, the CIA assists in the assassination of the democratically elected congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, throwing the country into years of turmoil. Before his assassination the CIA sent one of its scientists, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, to the Congo carrying “lethal biological material” intended for use in Lumumba’s assassination. This virus would have been able to produce a fatal disease indigenous to the Congo area of Africa and was transported in a diplomatic pouch.

In 1801, and again in 1815, the US aided Sweden in subjugating a series of coastal towns in North Africa, in the Barbary Wars. The stated reason was to crack down on pirates, but the wars destroyed the navies of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, and secured European and US shipping routes for goods and slaves in North Africa. US Representatives stated: “When we can appear in the Ports of the various Powers, or on the Coast, of Barbary, with Ships of such force as to convince those nations that We are able to protect our trade, and to compel them if necessary to keep faith with Us, then, and not before, We may probably secure a large share of the Meditn trade, which would largely and speedily compensate the U. S. for the Cost of a maritime force amply sufficient to keep all those Pirates in Awe, and also make it their interest to keep faith.” Thomas Jefferson echoed and carried out the war, saying that war was essential to securing markets along the Barbary Coast.

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directdogman · 8 months

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what was the thought process for making crown a president in the 1960s? it seems so recent in history for a world-changing event like the dialup..or were there events in actual history at that time which lined up with your ideas?

I began writing an answer to this question without considering what I was aiming to describe and wound up writing an essay much longer than this answer wound up being (I went back and checked! I went back to write this!) but I'm not a historian, just a two-bit game dev, so I rewrote this answer to be as concise as possible (while fully answering the question.) I have a tendency to ramble.

The 1960's was a weird decade. In terms of societal/cultural change, I'm not sure any one decade in American history has a greater shift. Vietnam was the first war the US fought and blatantly lost (and with significant civilian opposition during the war, something never seen before, with even wars with significant political opposition (eg Mexican-American + Spanish-American wars) still having the support of much of the American public.) The civil rights movement advanced considerably with the passing of the civil rights act of 1964 and voting rights act of 1965. The 50's had significant change too as I'll mention later, though these civil rights acts had support from congress, and from the political party that had opposed previous civil right advancement no less, leading to a gigantic voting demographics shift that has largely remained to this day.

The Cuban Missile Crisis happened, which is the closest the world has come to nuclear war, arguably. MLK and Malcolm X were both assassinated, alongside a sitting US president (in broad daylight.) When cultural leaders get shot, that's a sign that things are really heating up.

The 40's + 50's weren't actually great decades for American counterculture. The tireless work from civil rights activists during the 50's shouldn't be forgotten either ofc, with Brown vs the Board of Education, the Federal government enforcing the Supreme Court's ruling in Little Rock and the Montgomery bus boycotts, but generally, questioning American foreign policy and criticism of capitalism were treated with ruthlessness - civilians were brought before HUAC and actors theorized of having communist sympathies blacklisted by the Screen Actor's Guild (whose head was none other than a young President Ronald Reagan.)

Not only did this keep 'Unamerican' perspectives out of the American media, but America also spent an impressive amount of money on war propaganda in the 40's (with even heavy-hitters like Disney pumping out cartoons to increase public support for the war), making US patriotism very popular before the 50's, which only became further cemented with McCarthyism taking hold by the early 50's. "Under God" was added to the PoA and references to God was added onto the American dollar to further separate US culture from atheistic marxist-leninist cultures like the Soviet Union.

While the 50's saw certain socioeconomic advances, it was also a time of cultural/political regression... followed by a time of mass political unrest/revolution. Think of the 1920's compared to the 1930's, say. This kind of political shift makes for the perfect petri-dish to produce powerful demagogues.

The early 60's is a really weird time because it's perfectly cemented between the dissolution of McCarthyism and the complete reorganization of the American political establishment, including counter-cultural ideas gaining mainstream appeal. Any earlier or later, and Crown's ideas probably wouldn't have had the same momentum. If Crown had ran for office any later, he'd have stopped much sooner, imo. Part of Crown's rise was down to how much his enemies underestimated how large his movement would become and how sweeping his brand of populism would be (with even people like Norm getting swept up in it.)

TL;DR: The early 60's was the perfect period of time for a man like Crown to gain a foothold in mainstream culture without his enemies realizing just how dangerous he was to them... by 1964, they understood all too well.

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workingclasshistory · 10 months

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On this day, 27 July 1933, bus drivers in Havana went on strike, and other drivers soon walked out in sympathy. This was the start of the unrest that culminated in a general strike of Cuban workers and students that effectively shut down the nation and forced the brutal dictator Gerardo Machado from power. Machado made a last-minute deal with trade union leaders and the central committee of the Cuban Communist Party, claiming that they would be legalised and given government support if they ended the strike, but the agreement was rejected by workers, and the strike continued, even after police killed twenty demonstrators. On August 9, the military decided to stop supporting Machado, and two days later his government collapsed. Read this and hundreds of other stories in our book, Working Class History: Everyday Acts of Resistance & Rebellion, available here with global shipping: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/products/working-class-history-everyday-acts-resistance-rebellion-book https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=668662698640282&set=a.602588028581083&type=3

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minnesotafollower · 3 months

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Cuba’s Worsening Economic and Political Crisis

Emilio Morales, a Cuban who has had wide-ranging marketing experience on the island, is now the President and CEO of Havana Consulting Group, a Miami-based consulting firm specializing in market intelligence and strategy for U.S. and and non-U.S. persons doing business in Cuba.[1] Morales has provided a detailed analysis of Cuba’s worsening economic and political crisis.[2] The following is part…

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#Cuba #Cuban Armed Forces #Cuban Council of State #Cuban economy #Emilio Morales #FINCIMEX #GAESA #General Luis Alberto Rodriguez López Callejas #Havana Consulting Group #Raul Castro #Russia #Second National Conference of the Communist Party #Western Union

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beardedmrbean · 9 months

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madrid —

As Abraham Jimenez Enoa walked his 3-year-old son home from kindergarten, two men sidled up beside them.

“We know you are near your home,” one of them said.

The experience shook the exiled journalist, who says he decided to leave his adopted city of Barcelona for a while after the encounter in July.

Despite being expelled from Cuba last year for writing what he says is the truth about the country’s communist government, Jimenez Enoa says he has been targeted by unidentified men in Europe, including in Madrid and Amsterdam.

Each time, the men spoke with Cuban accents.

The journalist, who writes for The Washington Post, said he believes those targeting him are Cuban agents.

Members of his family were senior military figures, so Jimenez Enoa once lived a cushioned life at the heart of the Communist Party establishment. His family had close ties to the late Fidel Castro and Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara.

The 34-year-old turned his back on this life to forge a career as an independent journalist.

Neither the International Press Center in Havana — a government agency that handles media queries — nor the Cuban Embassy in Madrid replied to requests for comment from VOA about Jimenez Enoa's allegations.

Jimenez Enoa, like other dissidents who flee hostile regimes, says he is a victim of “transnational repression,” a tactic in which governments target critics outside their own borders.

Freedom House, which has been monitoring the phenomenon, says there were 854 verifiable incidents from 2014 to 2022, which included abductions, assassinations and attacks. Of these, 11% involved journalists.

Journalists in exile are targeted because they reveal uncomfortable facts about what is going on in their own countries — information that their governments do not want to make public.

China, Egypt, Russia, Turkey and Tajikistan were involved in the largest number of cases, according to Freedom House reports. China has been involved in 30% of the incidents, it said.

Jimenez Enoa believes the incident in July was an attempt by the Cuban government to intimidate him. He told VOA the two men approached him and said they knew where he lived.

“I didn’t know who said it. There were lots of people around,” he told VOA in an interview in Barcelona. “I saw two men who were laughing to themselves. They were dressed as Cuban diplomats [with a shirt and tie], then they went.”

Jimenez Enoa, who published The Hidden Island, a book about Cuba, said he was also followed at a book fair in Spain’s capital in May.

“At the book fair in Madrid, during the whole day, there was a man watching me and filming me. He did not say anything. Someone I spoke with said they had spoken to him and they said that he had a Cuban accent,” Jimenez Enoa recalled.

In March of last year, at a meeting in the Netherlands, Jimenez Enoa came face-to-face with a man he believes was a Cuban agent.

"A man started to offend me, saying everything I did was a lie. He continued to offend me. The organizers had to get him out of the place,” he said. “A diplomat [later] showed me a picture of the man and said he worked at the Cuban Embassy in Holland.”

Of his three encounters in Europe with what he believes were Cuban agents, the last incident was most disturbing, he said.

“I was with my son, and it was around the corner from my house. Each time these people had Cuban accents,” he said.

Jimenez Enoa said he did not report the incidents to the Spanish or Dutch police because he did not have any evidence to present.

The Committee to Project Journalists, which in 2020 honored Jimenez Enoa with an International Press Freedom Award, has called on Spanish authorities to investigate and ensure his safety.

The experiences are unsettling because Jimenez Enoa fled Cuba to avoid threats after enduring a campaign of harassment.

“I was put under house arrest; my phone was bugged. I was later arrested, handcuffed, strip-searched and questioned by security officers. Then they secretly filmed me and put my image on television, claiming I was a CIA spy,” he told VOA in an earlier interview.

“Later, they telephoned me and said I had to leave the country, or they would put me in prison and ‘terminate’ my family and the family of my wife.”

#nunyas news #tankies gonna be calling for his head

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pigeonrobespierre · 5 months

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Soo today I decided to look further into whathever happened to the I Giacobini screenplay - buckle in, I did my best to include as much info as I could find!!

"I Giacobini" (the jacobins) is an Italian screenplay from 1962 based on Federico Zardi's homonymous drama and it is, as of today, a lost media.

The cause for the disappearance of the screenplay from the RAI (Italian national public broadcasting company) archives is either reconduced to the lack of care for the preservation of medias at the time or to the theory which believes the cause to be due to political circumstances.

According to Wikipedia (eh):

...while Italy was in the hands of the Democrazia Cristiana, RAI for the first time broadcast to the public a screenplay «practically entirely aligned with the left and in which Robespierre doesn't come off as a bloody monster but rather like a Che Guevara of reason»

The Democrazia Cristiana or DC (Christian Democracy) was a centrist christian democratic political party in Italy.

The screenplay became largely appreciated by the public, as well as receiving praises from Palmiro Togliatti, exponent of the PCI (Italian communist party) - which happens to be one of the DC 's political opponents at the time.

(source)

Palmiro Togliatti on "Rinascita" wrote that television was bringing a change, since «for the first time it brought a representation of the French revolution inside Italian households»

I went ahead and looked through the archives of Rinascita but found this.

Here I found Togliatti's comment on the screenplay - the below image is a section of it:

The screenplay I Giacobini can be considered an important event of national culture. [...] What matters is that for some weeks a few billions of Italians, have seen and have had in front of their minds a revolution, have been brought to think about about it and to discuss it, seeing it as a political, social and human conflict.

It's then necessary to understand the political contexts of the time both within and outside of Italy:

(source)

...In 1962, under the threat of the cold war, a few months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, a screenplay remarked positively by the leader of a communist party in a NATO country could've raised any kind of reaction.

Thus, the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the screenplay is believed to be caused by some archivist involved with the democristian party.

While this is widely believed to be the reasoning behind it there's not much clear evidence and it's likely impossible to investigate since so much time has passed.

About the screenplay: it was broadcast in 6 episodes, of 90 minutes each, between 11th March - 15th April of 1962 (with a rerun in 1963 after which the tapes disappeared).

It originally featured La Marseillaise, La Carmagnole and Ça ira as well as 4 songs produced for the theater play by Gino Negri.

Audio Recording

In 2012 a man came forward with a (illegally) recorded copy of the audio from the screenplay and sent it over to the Rai archives. The studio managed to recover and digitalize the audios of the six episodes - sadly the video recording is still missing.

Funnily enough, the archive page on which the audios were supposedly made public is gone as of today - but I have found YouTube uploads here: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Also here's a doc that wast broadcast on Italian television on the 11th March of 2012, in honor of the 50 years since the first run of the screenplay - (it's in Italian, if anyone's interested I'll gladly sub it/provide a translation)

In short - bless that viewer for pirating the audio in 1962 and lots of hate to whoever lost the tapes..

Maybe I Giacobini was the friends we made along the way 🍊

#Hope this is good enough if I find more I'll add to this post :p #french revolution #frev #I giacobini (1962)#I giacobini #Frev lost media

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evilelitest2 · 10 months

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I wanted to echo a few points dimensionalrevolutionary said, as well as respond to a few things you said.

Firstly, implementing socialism without revolution has been tried before. Salvador Allende was a Marxist who was democratically elected President of Chile. As President, he began a number of programs to increase literacy, access to healthcare and employment, access to food, etc. You can look him up on your own time if you so choose. However, in 1973 a military coup forced him out of power and installed Augusto Pinochet, a dictator who killed thousands of innocents and caused many more to flee the country. This coup was backed by the United States, with Henry Kissinger saying “I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”

In Indonesia, the Communist Party operated within the framework of electoral politics and became the largest non-ruling Communist Party on the planet. In return, the Indonesian government and army conducted mass killings of communists in 1965, resulting in the deaths of around 1 million people (many of whom weren’t even Communist Party members, just wrongfully implicated). It is no coincidence that the socialist states that remain today are those that seized state power via a revolution rather than relying on electoralism. History has shown that any non-violent attempt to achieve socialism is doomed to brutal repression by the bourgeoisie.

Now to address some of your points. Your point on “Sweden’s backsliding is because it’s not diverse enough” is only looking at part of the picture. Obviously part of Sweden’s slide to the far right is due to racist and anti-immigration sentiments, this backsliding has been occurring long before that, as far back as the collapse of the USSR (which provided an incentive to keep Scandinavian workers happy, lest they be influenced by the socialists on the border). AzureScapegoat, a Swedish Marxist, has an excellent video on this through the lens of the Overton Window (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK1Ikx6el1E).

You say that most revolutions fail, which is true, but as I pointed out above every single attempt to achieve socialism via electoralism has failed. I would rather risk a low-percentage chance at achieving socialism than try the method that has NEVER succeeded.

Setting aside the fact that Hannah Arendt, a pivotal philosopher in defining authoritarianism/totalitarianism, was a massive racist who claimed anti-racism was totalitarianism (which immediately discredits the ideology for me), every government on the planet is “authoritarian.” Liberalism is just as authoritarian, it’s just that the powers-that-be are unelected and unaccountable billionaires who can set the rules of society to their whims by pouring ungodly amounts of money into the legalized bribery that is lobbying.

Regarding your final point on trans rights, while there are some parties that have bad views on LGBT+ rights (such as the KKE in Greece), in general implying that Marxists are uniquely bad when it comes to LGBT+ rights is laughable. The USSR, a country which dissolved over 30 years ago, didn’t have excellent LGBT+ rights? That’s so crazy, I wonder how LGBT+ rights were in the United States at the same time. It’s also laughable to say that the US has better LGBT+ rights than Cuba, a country which recently passed an incredibly progressive family law by popular vote (rather than via 9 unelected judges), and which provides trans Cubans free gender-affirming care (along with their other free healthcare).

Finally, bemoaning a socialist country like China for having worse LGBT+ rights than the USA is incredibly disingenuous. Less than a century ago large parts of China were still feudal. Less than 50 years ago China was a mostly rural society of poor farmers. Expecting Global South countries which have not had the same abilities to develop due to unequal exchange (and often had bigoted law codes forced upon them by imperialist countries) is intellectually dishonest. China’s LGBT+ rights are absolutely behind the United States, but the difference is that China is improving (recently Beijing made transitioning easier and Shanghai opened several clinics for LGBT+ youths), while the USA is backsliding. I feel the trajectory is far more significant.

Again, thanks for the polite response

I'm a historian, you can assume I know who Allende is, both Chille and Indonesia are some very dark stains on US history and the nation needs to apologize for it property. That isn't really a condemnation of social democracy though, its more a condemnation of School of the Americas, like any country is going to have trouble when an imperialist state overthrows there government to force a right wing mass murdering autocrat. Now the communist states who remain today have mostly become super capitalist at this point, so I'm not sure how much of a win that is.

Your youtube friend is simplifying things a tad, after the Soviet Union fell you had backsliding in some areas but also some major progressive reforms in others, its not a clear backslide until the last few years with the anti immigration nonsense because a major schism in Swedish politics has been the fact that it is a very homogenous country. Social Democracy tends to thrive better when it has a broad diverse base to draw upon and a more intersectional foundation

No friend no, you can't just gloss over the revolutionary logistics bit, your a Marxists, you are supposed to be consequentialist about this. WHAT IS YOUR SPECIFIC PLAN. A revolution without a plan is not a revolution, its a Che Guevara tee shirt with extra steps. What is your revolutionary plan in the United States (I assume you are American). What specific revolutionary steps are you taking. Do you know how to use a gun? Do you have an organized cell? What revolutions' are you modeling yourself after? Marx himself talks about this, Revolutionaries who are stuck on the romantic image of revolutions of the past rather than the realities of revolutions in the present. My argument against revolution is that in the United States, there is no model for it working unless circumstances change dramatically, or you secretly have control of the US military

For electoralism, you get tangible results, just compromised and disappointing one. Biden as I said is a centrist hack, but even under him, the United States has move to the left more in the last three years than in the 30 years before. The reason why so many unions are going on strike right now is because of Biden's policies (though possibly unintentionally). It also prevented Trump from turning the US into a dictatorship

I used to work for the Hannah Arendt society, I know her flaws, but she isn't the only scholar on Authoritarianism. (also Marx was racist, like come on dude) Liberals are often authoritarian, which is why i'm not a liberal, I'm a social democrat. Democratic foundations however produce more stable and egalitarian states than dictatorships, dictatorships are inherently right wing, you don't need Hannah Arendt to do that.

The US did have better policies on queer issues than the USSR. Not by much, its was pretty awful, but there is a reason why you managed to get a large gay rights organizing group going in the US and that never really took off in the USSR. This is to not let the US off the hook "better than the USSR" isn't a great moral accomplishment. And to be clear, the USSR was better than any far right government, so credit where its due, but its weird to mythologize a regime that was never good on any queer rights issue.

Cuba is a big reversals, because Castro infamously put gays into camps, but the regime has reversed itself a lot in the last 20 years. So you get one, one communist regime which genuinely got better on queer issues and got better than the capitalist states (though only after the dictators died and the state started to moderate but still). Credit where it is due

To be honest, I think you are taking a pretty patronizing attitude towards China. Even ignoring how China has had a very long homosexual tradition (again its not a Christian country) One of the entire points of communism is about "Dragging" nations in to modernity, even ignoring the problematic Hegalian framework of that, the fact is that the anti queer stuff in CHina isn't just coming from ignorant rural peasants, its from the party itself. In many ways, things got worse for queer people under Mao because the state was centralized enough to actually enforce its will more. China has made some progress in the last ten years, but the Party still to this day has not asserted Homosexuality as a human right

Also parts of the US have backslide, the Blue states have some of the best trans protections in the entire world, like its not good what is happening right now in America, but having lived abroad a lot, it can get so much worse. in the US at least, the majority of the country don't support this backslide, and while the Democrats do suck, they have not backslide as a party, if anything they have moved to be more inclusive (no where near enough though, I don't want to let them off the hook)

Finally, I tend to be much more comfortable with Marxists when they are clearly not tankies, but marxists places get so quickly infested with Tankie nonsense which inevitably leads them to repeat rightists talking points. So how the typical marxist response to the crisis in Ukraine is basically a copy/paste of Tucker's Carlson's talking points. I understand that not all Marxists are tankies, but I do think Marxism as an ideology really needs to get over the nostalgic worship of failed authoritarian states.

Cheers, fun discussion

#ask EvilElitest2 #communism #marxism #Tankies #Leninism

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gravedangerahead · 7 months

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On Palestine, G4S, and the Prison-Industrial Complex Speech at SOAS in London

(Angela Davis, December 13, 2013)

Transcript from the book Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

When this event highlighting the importance of boycotting the transnational security corporation G4S was organized, we could not have known that it would coincide with the death and memorialization of Nelson Mandela.

As I reflect on the legacies of struggle we associate with Mandela, I cannot help but recall the struggles that helped to forge the victory of his freedom and thus the arena on which South African apartheid was dismantled. Therefore I remember Ruth First and Joe Slovo, Walter and Albertina Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Oliver Tambo, Chris Hani, and so many others who are no longer with us. In keeping with Mandela’s insistence of always locating himself within a context of collective struggle, it is fitting to evoke the names of a few of his comrades who played pivotal roles in the elimination of apartheid.

While it is moving to witness the unanimous and continued outpouring of praise for Nelson Mandela, it is important to question the meaning of this sanctification. I know that he himself would have insisted on not being elevated, as a single individual, to a secular sainthood, but rather would have always claimed space for his comrades in the struggle and in this way would have seriously challenged the process of sanctification. He was indeed extraordinary, but as an individual he was especially remarkable because he railed against the individualism that would single him out at the expense of those who were always at his side. His profound individuality resided precisely in his critical refusal to embrace the individualism that is such a central ideological component of neoliberalism.

I therefore want to take the opportunity to thank the countless numbers of people here in the UK, including the many then-exiled members of the ANC and the South African Communist Party, who built a powerful and exemplary antiapartheid movement in this country. Having traveled here on numerous occasions during the 1970s and the 1980s to participate in antiapartheid events, I thank the women and men who were as unwavering in their commitment to freedom as was Nelson Mandela. Participation in such solidarity movements here in the UK was as central to my own political formation as were the movements that saved my life.

As I mourn the passing of Nelson Mandela I offer my deep gratitude to all of those who kept the antiapartheid struggle alive for so many decades, for all the decades that it took to finally rid the world of the racism and repression associated with the system of apartheid. And I evoke the spirit of the South African Constitution and its opposition to racism and anti-Semitism as well as to sexism and homophobia.

This is the context within which I join with you once more to intensify campaigns against another regime of apartheid and in solidarity with the struggles of the Palestinian people. As Nelson Mandela said, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

Mandela’s political emergence occurred within the context of an internationalism that always urged us to make connections among freedom struggles, between the Black struggle in the southern United States and the African liberation movements—conducted by the ANC in South Africa, the MPLA in Angola, SWAPO in Namibia, FRELIMO in Mozambique, and PAIGC in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. These international solidarities were not only among people of African descent but with Asian and Latin American struggles as well, including ongoing solidarity with the Cuban revolution and solidarity with the people struggling against US military aggression in Vietnam.

A half-century later we have inherited the legacies of those solidarities—however well or however badly specific struggles may have concluded—as what produced hope and inspiration and helped to create real conditions to move forward.

We are now confronted with the task of assisting our sisters and brothers in Palestine as they battle against Israeli apartheid today. Their struggles have many similarities with those against South African apartheid, one of the most salient being the ideological condemnation of their freedom efforts under the rubric of terrorism. I understand that there is evidence indicating historical collaboration between the CIA and the South African apartheid government—in fact, it appears that it was a CIA agent who gave SA authorities the location of Nelson Mandela’s whereabouts in 1962, leading directly to his capture and imprisonment.

Moreover, it was not until the year 2008—only five years ago—that Mandela’s name was taken off the terrorist watch list, when George W. Bush signed a bill that finally removed him and other members of the ANC from the list. In other words when Mandela visited the US after his release in 1990, and when he later visited as South Africa’s president, he was still on the terrorist list and the requirement that he be banned from the US had to be expressly waived.

The point I am making is that for a very long time, Mandela and his comrades shared the same status as numerous Palestinian leaders and activists today and that just as the US explicitly collaborated with the SA apartheid government, it continues to support the Israeli occupation of Palestine, currently in the form of over $8.5 million a day in military aid. We need to let the Obama administration know that the world knows how deeply the US is implicated in the occupation.

It is an honor to participate in this meeting, especially as one of the members of the International Political Prisoners Committee calling for the freedom of Palestinian political prisoners, recently formed in Cape Town, and also as a member of the jury of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. I would like to thank War on Want for sponsoring this meeting and progressive students, faculty, and workers at SOAS, for making it possible for us to be here this evening.

This evening’s gathering specifically focuses on the importance of expanding the BDS movement—the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement called for by Palestinian civil society—which has been crafted along the lines of the powerful model of the antiapartheid movement with respect to South Africa. While there numerous transnational corporations have been identified as targets of the boycott, Veolia for example, as well as Sodastream, Ahava, Caterpillar, Boeing, Hewlett Packard, and others, we are focusing our attention this evening on G4S.

G4S is especially important because it participates directly and blatantly in the maintenance and reproduction of repressive apparatuses in Palestine—prisons, checkpoints, the apartheid wall, to name only a few examples.

G4S represents the growing insistence on what is called “security” under the neoliberal state and ideologies of security that bolster not only the privatization of security but the privatization of imprisonment, the privatization of warfare, as well as the privatization of health care and education.

G4S is responsible for the repressive treatment of political prisoners inside Israel. Through Addameer, directed by Sahar Francis, we have learned about the terrifying universe of torture and imprisonment which is faced by so many Palestinians but also about their hunger strikes and other forms of resistance.

G4S is the third-largest private corporation in the world—behind Walmart, which is the largest, and Foxconn, the second largest.

On the G4S website, one discovers that the company represents itself as capable of providing protection for a broad range of “people and property,” from rock stars and sports stars to “ensuring that travelers have a safe and pleasant experience in ports and airports around the world to secure detention and escorting of people who are not lawfully entitled to remain in a country.”

“In more ways than you might realize,” the website reads, “G4S is securing your world.” We might add that in more ways that we realize, G4S has insinuated itself into our lives under the guise of security and the security state—from the Palestinian experience of political incarceration and torture to racist technologies of separation and apartheid; from the wall in Israel to prison-like schools in the US and the wall along the US-Mexico border. G4S-Israel has brought sophisticated technologies of control to HaSharon prison, which includes children among its detainees, and Damun prison, which incarcerates women.

Against this backdrop, let us explore the deep involvement of G4S in the global prison-industrial complex. I am not only referring to the fact that the company owns and operates private prisons all over the world, but that it is helping to blur the boundary between schools and jails. In the US schools in poor communities of color are thoroughly entangled with the security state, so much so that sometimes we have a hard time distinguishing between schools and jails. Schools look like jails; schools use the same technologies of detection as jails and they sometimes use the same law enforcement officials. In the US some elementary schools are actually patrolled by armed officers. As a matter of fact, a recent trend among school districts that cannot afford security companies like G4S has been to offer guns and target practice to teachers. I kid you not.

But G4S, whose major proficiencies are related to security, is actually involved in the operation of schools. A website entitled “Great Schools” includes information on Central Pasco Girls Academy in Florida, which is represented as a small alternative public school. If you look at the facilities page of the G4S website you will discover this entry: “Central Pasco Girls Academy serves moderate-risk females, ages 13-18, who have been assessed as needing intensive mental health services.” G4S indicates that they use “gender-responsive services” and that they address sexual abuse and substance abuse, et cetera. While this may sound relatively innocuous, it is actually a striking example of the extent to which security has found its way into the educational system, and thus also of the way education and incarceration have been linked under the sign of capitalist profit. This example also demonstrates that the reach of the prison-industrial complex is far beyond the prison.

This company that provides “security” for numerous agencies as well as rehabilitation services for young girls “at risk” in the United States, while operating private prisons in Europe, Africa, and Australia, also provides equipment and services to Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank along the route of Israel’s apartheid wall as well as to the terminals from which Gaza is kept under continuous siege. G4S also provides goods and services to the Israeli police in the West Bank, while it offers security to private businesses and homes in illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine.

As private prison companies have long recognized, the most profitable sector of the prison-industrial complex is immigrant detention and deportation. In the US, G4S provides transportation for deportees who are being ushered out of the US into Mexico, thus colluding with the increasingly repressive immigration practices inside the US. But it was here in the UK where one of the most egregious acts of repression took place in the course of the transportation of an undocumented person.

When I was in London during the month of October, speaking at Birkbeck School of Law, I spoke to Deborah Coles, codirector of the organization Inquest, about the case of Jimmy Mubenga, who died at the hands of G4S guards in the course of a deportation from the UK to Angola. On a British Airways plane, handcuffed behind his back, Mubenga was forcibly pushed by G4S agents against the seat in front of him in the prohibited “carpet karaoke” hold in order to prevent him from vocalizing his resistance. The use of such a term for a law enforcement hold, albeit illegal, is quite astonishing. It indicates that the person subject to the hold is compelled to “sing into the carpet”—or in the case of Mubenga—into the upholstered seat in front, thus rendering his protests muffled and incomprehensible. As Jimmy Mubenga was held for forty minutes, no one intervened. By the time there was finally an attempt to offer him first aid, he was dead.

This appalling treatment of undocumented immigrants from the UK to the US compels us to make connections with Palestinians who have been transformed into immigrants against their will, indeed into undocumented immigrants on their own ancestral lands. I repeat—on their own land. G4S and similar companies provide the technical means of forcibly transforming Palestinian into immigrants on their own land.

As we know, G4S is involved in the operation of private prisons all over the world. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (CO-SATU) recently spoke out against G4S, which runs the Mangaung Correctional Centre in the Free State. The occasion for their protest was the firing of approximately three hundred members of the police union for staging a strike. According to the COSATU statement:

G4S’s modus operandi is indicative of two of the most worrying aspects of neoliberal capitalism and Israeli apartheid: the ideology of “security” and the increasing privatization of what have been traditionally state run sectors. Security, in this context, does not imply security for everyone, but rather, when one looks at the major clients of G4S Security (banks, governments, corporations etc.) it becomes evident that when G4S says it is “Securing your World,” as the company slogan goes, it is referring to a world of exploitation, repression, occupation and racism.

When I traveled to Palestine two years ago with a delegation of indigenous and women-of-color scholar/activists, it was the first time the members of the delegation had actually visited Palestine. Most of us had been involved for many years in Palestine solidarity work, but we were all thoroughly shocked to discover that the repression associated with Israeli settler colonialism was so evident and so blatant. The Israeli military made no attempt to conceal or even mitigate the character of the violence they inflicted on the Palestinian people.

Gun-carrying military men and women—many extremely young—were everywhere. The wall, the concrete, the razor wire everywhere conveyed the impression that we were in prison. Before Palestinians are even arrested, they are already in prison. One misstep and one can be arrested and hauled off to prison; one can be transferred from an open-air prison to a closed prison.

G4S clearly represents these carceral trajectories that are so obvious in Palestine but that also increasingly characterize the profit-driven moves of transnational corporations associated with the rise of mass incarceration in the US and the world.

On any given day there are almost 2.5 million people in our country’s jails, prisons, and military prisons, as well as in jails in Indian country and immigrant detention centers. It is a daily census, so it doesn’t reflect the numbers of people who go through the system every week or every month or every year. The majority are people of color. The fastest-growing sector consists of women —women of color. Many are queer or trans. As a matter of fact, trans people of color constitute the group most likely to be arrested and imprisoned. Racism provides the fuel for maintenance, reproduction, and expansion of the prison-industrial complex.

And so if we say abolish the prison-industrial complex, as we do, we should also say abolish apartheid, and end the occupation of Palestine!

In the United States when we have described the segregation in occupied Palestine that so clearly mirrors the historical apartheid of racism in the southern United States of America—and especially before Black audiences—the response often is: “Why hasn’t anyone told us about this before? Why hasn’t anyone told us about the segregated highways leading from one settlement to another, about pedestrian segregation regulated by signs in Hebron—not entirely dissimilar from the signs associated with the Jim Crow South. Why hasn’t anyone told us this before?”

Boycott G4S! Support BDS!

Just as we say “never again” with respect to the fascism that produced the Holocaust, we should also say “never again” with respect to apartheid in South Africa, and in the southern US. That means, first and foremost, that we will have to expand and deepen our solidarity with the people of Palestine. People of all genders and sexualities. People inside and outside prison walls, inside and outside the apartheid wall.

Palestine will be free!

Thank you.

#free palestine #palestine #gaza #angela davis #Youtube #Freedom Is A Constant Struggle

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Why has America tolerated 6 illegitimate Republican presidents?

Thom Hartmann

April 15, 2024 9:11AM ET

"Ronald and Nancy Reagan, 1964” image showing The Reagans aboard an unidentified boat in this 1964 photo released on June 1, 2016. Courtesy The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation/Handout via REUTERS

As we watch the Trump campaign prepare to replace 50,000 civil servants with fascist toadies if he wins the White House, it’s important to remember that Dwight Eisenhower was the last Republican president who believed in democracy, the rule of law, and that government should prioritize what the people want.

From 1960 to today a series of leaders within the Republican Party have abandoned the democracy that American soldiers fought the Revolutionary War to secure, the Civil War to defend here at home, and World War II in Europe and the Pacific to defend around the world.

This has brought us a series of criminal Republican presidents and corrupt Republican Supreme Court justices, who’ve legalized political bribery while devastating voting and civil rights.

None of this was a mistake or an accident, because none of these people truly believed in democracy.

This rejection of democracy and turn toward criminality and it’s logical end-point, fascism, started in the modern GOP with Richard Nixon.

He took millions in now-well-documented bribes both while Vice President to Eisenhower and as President (his VP, Spiro Agnew, resigned rather than go to prison for taking bribes). Nixon saw public service as a way to bathe himself in money, power, and adulation.

He didn’t care a bit about democracy.

As Lamar Waldron and I point out in detail in Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination, then-President Eisenhower’s then-Vice President, Richard Nixon, was getting beat up badly in the 1960 election by his opponent, Senator John F. Kennedy.

Most of it had to do with Cuba, where mobsters affiliated with Nixon for decades had just lost fortunes, millions and millions of dollars in annual revenue.

After the Cuban revolution of 1959, Castro came to the US to seek military and economic aid for his island nation; Eisenhower left town, forcing Castro to meet instead with VP Nixon.

Given that Castro had just overthrown the dictator Batista, a friend of both Nixon and Nixon’s mafia patrons, the Vice President essentially blew off Castro, sending him into the welcoming arms of Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union.

Thus, throughout the 1960 presidential race, Senator Kennedy pounded on Vice President Nixon for having “let Cuba go communist” on his watch. In response, Vice President Nixon put together a series of CIA and Mafia plots to assassinate Castro, timed to happen before the November 1960 election.

His hope was that if the Eisenhower/Nixon administration could be seen as having successfully overthrown Castro in 1960 it would de-fang JFK’s attacks and make Nixon — who Eisenhower had put in charge of Cuba policy — a national hero just in time for the election.

Nixon figured that would be enough to help him beat JFK at the polls. It was going to be his “October Surprise.” (The remnant of this scheme was the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.)

For Nixon democracy was just an inconvenience, an obstacle to be conquered. He never really believed in it.

You can imagine Nixon’s frustration when plot after plot was bungled or foiled and, by election day, Castro was still happily ensconced in the Havana presidential palace. This appears to be the moment Nixon decided that, if he had a chance to run for president again, he’d not just consider a CIA-Mafia plot but would embrace far more extreme measures.

Thus began the first Republican plot to commit full-out treason to win a presidential election.

It started in the summer of 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson was desperately trying to end the Vietnam war. It had turned into both a personal and political nightmare for him, and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was running for President in the election that year against a “reinvented” Richard Nixon.

Johnson spent most of late 1967 and early 1968 working back-channels to North and South Vietnam, and by the summer of 1968 had a tentative agreement from both for what promised to be a lasting peace deal they’d both sign that fall.

But Richard Nixon knew that if he could block that peace deal, it would kill VP Hubert Humphrey’s chances of winning the 1968 election. So, Nixon sent envoys from his campaign to talk to South Vietnamese leaders to encourage them not to attend upcoming peace talks in Paris.

The bribe was straightforward: Nixon promised South Vietnam’s corrupt politicians that he’d give them a richer deal when he was President than LBJ could give them then.

The FBI had been wiretapping these international communications and told LBJ about Nixon’s effort to prolong the Vietnam War. Thus, just three days before the 1968 election, President Johnson phoned the Republican Senate leader, Everett Dirksen, (you can listen to the entire conversation here):

President Johnson: “Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese] president that if he’ll hold out ’til November 2nd they could get a better deal. Now, I’m reading their hand. I don’t want to get this in the campaign. And they oughtn’t to be doin’ this, Everett. This is treason.” Sen. Dirksen: “I know.”

Those tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and that’s Richard Nixon who Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason.

At that point, for President Johnson, it was no longer about getting Humphrey elected. By then Nixon’s plan had already worked and Humphrey was way down in the polls because the war was ongoing.

Instead, Johnson was desperately trying to salvage the peace talks to stop the death and carnage as soon as possible. He literally couldn’t sleep.

In a phone call to Nixon himself just before the election, LBJ begged him to stop sabotaging the peace process, noting that he was almost certainly going to win the election and inherit the war anyway. Instead, Nixon publicly announced that LBJ’s efforts were “in shambles.”

But South Vietnam had taken Nixon’s deal and boycotted the peace talks, the war continued, and Nixon won the White House thanks to it.

An additional twenty-two thousand American soldiers, and an additional million-plus Vietnamese died because of Nixon’s 1968 treason, and he left it to Jerry Ford to end the war and evacuate the American soldiers.

Nixon appointed Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, and William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court, pushing it hard to the right and setting up the predecessors of Citizens United.

Rehnquist, we later learned, didn’t believe any more in democracy than did Nixon. He’d made his chops in the GOP with Operation Eagle Eye, standing outside polling places in Hispanic and Native American precincts in Arizona challenging every voter who showed up there’s right to cast a ballot.

Nixon was never held to account for that treason, and when the LBJ library released the tapes and documentation long after his and LBJ’s deaths it was barely noticed by the American press.

Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon, was never elected to the White House (he was appointed to replace VP Spiro Agnew, after Agnew was indicted for decades of taking bribes), and thus would never have been President had it not been for Richard Nixon’s treason.

Ford pardoned Nixon and appointed John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court.

Next up was Ronald Reagan. He not only didn’t believe in democracy, he didn’t even believe in the American government.

Like Trump, he ridiculed public service like joining the military or getting a job with a government agency; he joked that there were no smart or competent people in government because if there had been, private industry would have already hired them away.

So, if you don’t believe in democracy and you think the US government is a joke, it’s not a big deal to betray your country to get the wealth, power, and fame that goes with the presidency.

During the Carter/Reagan election battle of 1980, then-President Carter had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr to release the fifty-two hostages held by students at the American Embassy in Tehran.

Bani-Sadr was a moderate and, as he explained in an editorial for The Christian Science Monitor, successfully ran for President that summer on the popular position of releasing the hostages:

“I openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign…. I won the election with over 76 percent of the vote…. Other candidates also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it [hostage-taking].”

Carter was confident that with Bani-Sadr’s help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of 1979.

But, like Nixon, behind Carter’s back the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with the head of Iran’s radical faction — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini — to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 Presidential election. Khomeini needed spare parts for American weapons systems the Shah had purchased for Iran, and the Reagan campaign was happy to promise them.

This was the second act of treason by a Republican wanting to become president.

The Reagan campaign’s secret negotiations with Khomeini — the so-called 1980 “Iran/Contra Scandal” — sabotaged President Carter’s and Iranian President Bani-Sadr’s attempts to free the hostages. As President Bani-Sadr told The Christian Science Monitor in March of 2013:

“After arriving in France [in 1981], I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism.

“Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”

And Reagan’s treason — just like Nixon’s treason — worked perfectly, putting a third Republican president in office after Nixon and Ford. Neither Nixon nor Reagan believed in or held up democracy and the rule of law that underpins it as a value.

The Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Jimmy Carter’s re-election hopes. And the same day Reagan took the oath of office — to the minute, as Reagan put his hand on the bible, by way of Iran’s acknowledging the deal — the American hostages in Iran were released.

Keeping his side of the deal, Reagan began selling the Iranians weapons and spare parts in 1981 (and using the money to illegally fund rightwing neofascist death squad “Contras” in Nicaragua) and continued until he was busted for it in 1986, producing the so-called “Iran Contra” scandal.

Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy to the Supreme Court, solidifying its rightwing tilt. We’d learn, in the Bush v Gore case in 2000 when they awarded the White House to the son of Reagan’s VP, that none of the three of them valued democracy.

And, like Nixon, Reagan was never held to account for the criminal and treasonous actions that brought him to office.

After Reagan, Bush senior was elected but, like Jerry Ford, Bush was only President because he’d served as Vice President under Reagan. And, of course, the naked racism of his Willie Horton ads helped keep him in office.

The criminal investigation into Iran/Contra came to a head with independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh subpoenaing President George HW Bush after having already obtained convictions for Weinberger, Ollie North and others.

For the first time in history, the President of the United States could go to jail for criminal conspiracy. Bush was sweating.

George HW Bush’s attorney general, Bill Barr (yes, the same guy Trump hired), suggested he pardon all six co-conspirators — who could point a finger at Bush — to kill the investigation. Bush did it on Christmas Eve, hoping to avoid the news cycle because of the holiday.

Nonetheless, the screaming headline across the New York Times front page on December 25, 1992, said it all: “THE PARDONS: BUSH PARDONS 6 IN IRAN AFFAIR, ABORTING A WEINBERGER TRIAL; PROSECUTOR ASSAILS 'COVER-UP’”

If the October Surprise hadn’t hoodwinked voters in 1980, you can bet Bush senior would never have been elected in 1988.

That’s four illegitimate Republican presidents.

President GHW Bush appointed Clarence Thomas and David Souter to the Supreme Court. We learned quickly that Thomas doesn’t value democracy. We now know his wife actively worked to subvert it, in fact.

Which brings us to George W. Bush, the man who was given the White House by five Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court.

In the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount and thus handed George W. Bush the presidency, Justice Antonin Scalia (appointed by Bush’s father’s boss) wrote in his opinion:

“The counting of votes … does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election.”

Apparently, denying the presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in Florida and won the popular vote nationwide by over a half-million, did not constitute “irreparable harm” to Scalia or the media.

And apparently it wasn’t important that Scalia’s son worked for a law firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (with no Scalia recusal).

Just like it wasn’t important that Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife worked on the Bush transition team — before the Supreme Court shut down the recount in Florida — and was busy accepting resumes from people who would serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in Florida…which he did. There was no Thomas recusal, either.

None of them believed in democracy.

More than a year after the election a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did their own recount of the vote in Florida — manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year — and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the presidency in 2000.

As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”

That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story so that it would attract as little attention as possible, because the 9/11 attacks had happened just weeks earlier and the publishers of the big newspapers feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush lost the election would further hurt a nation already in crisis.

To compound the crime, Bush could only have gotten as close to Gore in the election as he did because his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, had ordered his Secretary of State, Kathrine Harris, to purge at least 57,000 mostly-Black voters from the state’s voter rolls just before the election.

Tens of thousands of African Americans showed up to vote and were turned away from the polls in that election in Florida. BBC covered it extensively, although the American media didn’t seem interested.

So, for the third time in 4 decades, Republicans took the White House under illegitimate electoral circumstances. Even President Carter was shocked by the brazenness of that one. And Jeb Bush and the GOP were never held to account for that crime against democracy.*

President George W. Bush appointed Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Alito not only doesn’t believe in democracy, he also doesn’t believe in a woman’s right to get an abortion. He’d put a judge like himself between a woman and her doctor, with a police officer and a prison to enforce his decree.

Most recently, in 2016, Trump ally Kris Kobach and Republican Secretaries of State across the nation used Interstate Crosscheck to purge millions of legitimate voters — most people of color — from the voting rolls just in time for the Clinton/Trump election.

Meanwhile, Russian oligarchs and the Russian state, and possibly pro-Trump groups or nations in the Middle East, funded a widespread program to flood social media with pro-Trump, anti-Clinton messages from accounts posing as Americans, as documented by Robert Mueller’s investigation.

And on top of that, we learned in 2020 that Republican campaign data on the 2016 election, including which states needed a little help via phony influencers on Facebook and other social media, was not only given to Russian spy and oligarch Konstantin Kilimnik by Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort, but Kilimnik transferred it to Russian intelligence.

Even with all that treasonous help from Russia, Donald Trump still lost the national vote by nearly 3 million votes but came to power in 2016 through the electoral college, an artifact of the Founding era designed to keep slavery safe in colonial America.**

And then, in 2021, after losing to Joe Biden by 7 million votes, Trump mounted a seditious effort to overturn the election he’d just lost.

Trump didn’t believe in democracy in the least; he openly fawned over autocratic and fascistic states and their leaders.

After Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans blocked President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, President Donald Trump filled Garland’s spot with Neil Gorsuch, the son of Reagan’s disgraced former EPA administrator, Anne Gorsuch.

For reasons that are still unclear, shortly after Trump mentioned Kennedy’s son to him publicly at the Gorsuch ceremony, Justice Kennedy decided to resign. Whether it had anything to do with young Justin Kennedy — then working at Deutsche Bank and having signed off on over a billion dollars in corrupt loans to Trump — is still unknown, and Kennedy, still in good health, isn’t talking.

Kennedy was replaced by “Blackout” Brett Kavanaugh, who had previously worked in the Bush White House. Republicans refused to turn over 95 percent of Kavanaugh’s papers to the Senate Judiciary Committee and jammed through his nomination after an epic meltdown on live television.

When Ruth Bader Ginsberg died just before the 2020 election, McConnell decided his “Garland Rule” was irrelevant and jammed through Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett in about six weeks; she was sworn in on October 27, 2020. When Democrats raised questions about Barrett’s role as a “Handmaid” (what she called herself) in a bizarre Catholic cult they were brushed aside.

Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanuagh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. We now know none of the three of them believe in democracy, either.

Fifty-four years of Republican presidents using treason to achieve the White House (or inheriting it from one who did) has transformed America and dramatically weakened our democracy.

Those presidents have contributed their own damages to the rule of law and democracy in America, but their cynical Supreme Court appointments have arguably done the most lasting damage.

Republican appointees on the Court during this time have gutted the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, union rights, the Affordable Care Act, and legalized Republican voter purges. They legalized the bribery of politicians by billionaires and corporations.

In short, they’ve done everything they can to weaken democracy and enforce minority rule in America.

One of their wives appears to have been involved in the January 6th attempted overthrow of our electoral process and thus our republic. Republican justices and judges openly flaunt the judicial code of ethics and routinely hand decisions to the GOP’s largest donors.

Today’s fascistic behavior by elected Republicans and their appointees on the courts has a long history, deeply rooted in multiple acts of treachery and treason. “Power at any cost” has been their slogan ever since Nixon’s attempts to assassinate Castro in 1960 to beat JFK in that year’s election.

Democracy? They laugh.

Which is why it’s time to call the Republican Party what it is: a criminal enterprise embracing fascism to hang onto power, a threat to our republic, and a danger to all life on Earth.

*For more detail, this is extensively documented and footnoted in my book The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.

**This is covered in depth in my book The Hidden History of the War On Voting.

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