The Empire Versus Civilization
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
One aspect of the current clash of civilizations that goes largely unnoticed in the US is that there is only one civilization, if we can call it that, doing the clashing. That would be the US and its arrangement of vassals that emerged from WWII. As if participating in an exploitation video called good vassals gone bad, the former liberal governments of Europe have moved hard to the foreign policy right. Through near-complete reversal of the Western liberal order, the West is back to fighting WWII. Only without any defensive missiles. Or competent leaders.
Rumors, as in stories in the mainstream press, have it that the US is running dangerously low on defensive (‘interceptor’) missiles. Iran reportedly possesses and has been using offensive (‘strike’) hypersonic missiles that fly too fast to be reliably intercepted. The minimum lead time for the US to produce more defensive missiles is three to five years. Without defensive missiles, US ‘assets’ in the Gulf, including (US) military bases, cannot be defended against Iranian missiles. That US military planners didn’t foresee this suggests that competence isn’t their strength.
Not that Americans would know anything about it. No news or low-quality propaganda are what we are fed. For one-and-one-half-trillion-dollars-per-year (Pentagon budget), higher quality propaganda should be the least that we get. Depending on the telling, either Ansar Allah (the Houthis) or Iran-affiliated militias in Iraq (remember Iraq?) have destroyed critical oil and gas infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Aramco Jizan and Abqaiq Oil Stabilization Plant have been largely destroyed. Refineries and pipelines are ablaze.
How oil prices declined as they did in the presence of major supply disruptions tells us that markets have nothing to do with it. The US and its allies have been depleting their SPRs (Strategic Petroleum Reserves) since the launch of the US – Israeli war against Iran. The US SPR has about 300 million barrels left out of a target level of 700 million barrels. The understanding here is that the US military wants a minimum level of 350 million barrels. But the Trump administration is willing to take it down to 70 million barrels.
An analogy would be spending your life savings to maintain the appearance of prosperity going into a recession. If the economy recovers in time to restore incomes, the strategy ‘works.’ But if it doesn’t, the cash cushion is gone and the US goes from being rich to being poor the minute the savings run out. In political space – time, if the SPR hasn’t been drained of oil by the midterm elections, Donald Trump’s political chestnuts with respect to oil prices will have been pulled out of the fire. That the day after election day the whole charade could fall apart suggests that the US needs more robust systems of political accountability.
But Donald Trump’s political fortunes are the least to be concerned with given the events that have already transpired. The Saudi refineries that have been destroyed represent critical infrastructure that feeds global oil and gas supplies. Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG processing facility was significantly destroyed in March. The Strait of Hormuz has now been substantially closed for five months with no signs of reopening. And the world’s SPRs have been brought to dangerously low levels. The time-to-repair for both the Saudi facilities and Ras Laffan is five years. For those doing the math, the world is screwed. The consequences of Trump’s war against Iran will be with us for decades.
Adding fuel to the fire is that Trump has scuttled the very possibility of negotiations to end the conflict. Having bombed Iran twice in the midst of negotiations and then treated the MOU as a joke, the Iranians are correct to suspect that Trump is incapable of negotiating in good faith. Adding to the evidence is the six months of US negotiations with Saudi Arabia regarding the ‘123 agreement’ (details below) that Trump threw in the trash by adding the condition that the Saudis sign on to the Abraham Accord (recognizing Israel) after both sides had signed the deal.
With respect to causes, upwards of forty million Iranians braved brutal summer heat to attend the funeral of Iran’s martyred Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. This turnout would be the envy of any Western leader. It is evidence of a relationship between the Iranian leader and the faithful that stands largely outside of Western experience. His martyrdom is evidence of blindness by Western leaders to the unifying effect of shared enemies. That US and Israeli leaders had such a distorted view of how Ali Khamenei is viewed could and should be revelatory. They don’t know what they are doing. The Israelis in particular appear to be working from KKK training manuals.
The lies intended to frighten us into consenting to these wars–foreign threats (e.g. WMD’s), insane or otherwise irrational foreign leaders, oppressed and put upon people in desperate need of being ‘liberated,’ and resources that the US wants, follow the same regime change script every time. We, the people, are assumed to be well-trained monkeys who press a button and are fed the New York Times’ non-explanation of events. And the paradox of psychological manipulation is that we all have psychologies–even (especially) the psychologists creating techniques of social control.
So, here we are. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed even though a guarantee of global economic catastrophe is baked in to keeping it so. According to the military commenters that I trust, there is no military solution that would end Iran’s control over the Strait that wouldn’t also end humanity. The only solution to the current quagmire is negotiation–which the US is incapable of. In Trump-world, negotiation is for weaklings. This seems short sighted. Power is in the process of being redistributed from West to East. As Bob Dylan put it, ‘the loser today, will be later to win.’
So, how does this get resolved? Jeff Sachs’ solution is for both sides to just stop fighting. As a near-term solution, Sachs’ logic is unassailable. The US can’t be trusted to abide by an agreement, so why bother? The problem is that neither Trump nor the Israeli leadership care if they light the world on fire. The evidence? They are lighting it on fire. Pundits suggest that Trump and Netanyahu are playing eight-dimensional-chess. Really? With apologies, aren’t these the same people who attacked Iran without considering the Strait of Hormuz? A drooling contest seems the better metaphor.
As much as I like the simplicity of the ‘just leave’ solution, this probably has to be settled on the battlefield. While the take here is that the Iranians prefer peace, the siege of Stalingrad–painful as it was, worked to the advantage of the Soviets. Trump just tried rounds three and four of bombing to open the Strait to no avail. Knowing that the US and Israel are out of interceptor missiles, if I were Iran, I would make onerous demands to make up for Trump’s fakery with respect to the MOU and then start leveling Tel Aviv as I did so. The goal would be to make it so painful for the West to persist with its attacks that it stops doing so.
As losers in this war of choice, both Trump and the Pentagon can still blow things up. But as they do so, they are demonstrating their own impotence. The point in blowing things up is to coerce a desired political outcome from one’s adversary. But it was understood by March 2nd or 3rd that the US had committed a major military blunder and that it would be lucky to exit the situation intact. But rather than stop digging, Trump has doubled and tripled down. Heads, he wins. Heads or Tails, the entire world loses. But hey, at least he has his priorities straight?
If there exists a ‘fifth column’ in the US, it is Zionists. Donald Trump was paid up to $250 million by Sheldon and Miriam Adelson to attack and murder enemies of Israel. Amongst the current and former supporters of Trump of whom I am aware, they all now see him as the agent of a hostile foreign power. Why it is a surprise that the man who took the money then does the bidding of Israel is itself a mystery. That this is politically acceptable to those purporting to want to make America great again is one of the great mysteries of the age.
Further, the US House of Representatives recently passed the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) seeking to integrate parts of the US and Israeli militaries. The apparent goal is to remove the multi-billion-dollar ($3.3 billion per annum) transfers of money to Israel that have created political controversy in order to better hide the payments from the public. Question: if the public favors the transfers, why hide them? And if the public doesn’t favor the transfers, why make them?
While the NDAA hasn’t yet passed the Senate, rumor has it that the Senate wants to fully integrate Mossad and the CIA. Given the reach that Israel already has into US affairs and how despised it is by a large and growing proportion of the American people, Zionist oligarchs appear intent on cramming this integration down our throats. Mossad is less well regarded than Donald Trump by much of the world. If the Congressional intent is to demonstrate that the US really is a dystopian hellhole, it’s working.
This comes at a seemingly inopportune time for agents of Israel in the White House and the US Congress. Israel created the failed plan that turned into Trump’s plan of attack against Iran. It is amongst the worst– least knowledgeable of the facts on the ground, most fantasy-filled regarding who it is that is being attacked, plans ever conceived. The IDF and MOSSAD screwed this up so badly that no rational nation would tie its fortunes to Israel. This aligns with the Alliance of Democracies declaring Israel to be the least liked nation on the planet in 2026.
Westerners typically see genocide as an intentional act (e.g., Gaza). But the recklessness with which the US war against Iran is being prosecuted suggests that the definition be expanded to cover acts so egregious that their very recklessness confers legal liability. Donald Trump is reported to have articulated the social emergency that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz would create. ‘The world’ had only few weeks to get global energy supplies moving again before mass starvation and economic calamity were guaranteed. Well, those few weeks is up.
The economic destruction currently taking place is incalculable. Globalization created interrelationships and dependencies that only work in one direction. A global food system on which billions of humans depend, that itself depends on petroleum-based fertilizers and the capacity to deliver food around the world, is being destroyed. The global energy system that runs factories is being destroyed. Millions to billions of human lives have been put at risk by people who do not understand the consequences of their actions.
As the facts have it, the Strait of Hormuz was open and ship traffic flowed until the US and Israel attacked Iran on February 28th. This makes all of the follow-on problems in the Strait the fault of the US and Israel. The American practice of creating catastrophes and then pointing to them as the reason to create more catastrophes is on full display. The US wants the Strait opened. But it was open before the US and Israel attacked Iran. How socially destructive these people are is awe-inspiring. It approximates the number of stars in the universe.
The Iranians, likely in consultation with their allies, have recently foregone direct attacks on Israel. The goal is most likely escalation management to prevent a runaway conflict. But it also suggests that the Iranians perceive the US to be controlling the war. Otherwise, turning Tel Aviv into Gaza would seemingly be a priority. The logic is simple. If Israel is the problem, then ending Israel would end the problem. Otherwise, chasing the US out of the Persian Gulf–a stated Iranian objective- makes strategic sense.
Fans of schadenfreude had a good week as the US and Saudi Arabia signed the ‘123 agreement’ facilitating the building of a nuclear reactor in Saudi Arabia. The deal was reportedly negotiated and signed before Donald Trump added the condition that the Saudis sign on to the Abraham Accord officially recognizing Israel. This is akin to agreeing to buy a car before being told that the motor needed to run it is a separate deal. The Saudis reportedly told Trump where to stick his deal once the hidden condition was revealed.
Image: Whereas forty million Iranians attended Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s funeral. Trump’s National State Fair had difficulty drawing a few hundred Americans. This bodes poorly for Western leaders hoping for a respectful send-off. But keep heart. At least some of those who lost money on Trump’s crypto grift will show up to see if they can get their money back. Were Trump and Netanyahu to end their days in close proximity, the prospect of them spending eternity together would beat those existentialist plays from the 1950s. If there is a hell, that would be it. Source: agriculture.com.
As far as the Saudis go, current events couldn’t be happening to a more deserving group of people. A likely factor in Ansar Allah joining the fight is to exact revenge for the Saudi genocide in Yemen. As with Israel in Gaza, the US sold the Saudis the weapons with which to commit genocide and provided the political cover to keep it quiet. The Saudis starved upwards of one million Yeminis (UN says 377,000, but it always undercounts) as the US administration at the time (2014 – 2015) looked on approvingly.
To the alleged Iranian nuclear threat, the ‘123 agreement’ should open some eyes. The US couldn’t possibly object to nuclear proliferation given its ongoing role in facilitating nuclear proliferation. Under Eisenhower’s ‘Atoms for Peace’ program, the US gave Iran the only nuclear reactor that it was known to possess until recently. This was when Iran was a US vassal. The Iranian Revolution ended this vassalage in 1979. It is why the US is at war with Iran. The US is a spurned imperial overlord. Think Misery in the Stephen King novel by that name.
Israeli paranoia about Iran having nuclear weapons seems poorly considered. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei opposed the development of nuclear weapons when he was martyred by the US and Israel. Skepticism by the Americans regarding Iran’s intentions is understandable. Every word uttered by the US is a lie. What the US does is called projection. The Americans assume that the Iranians are lying because the Americans always, always, always lie. Recall Trump telling us that the Iranian nuclear program had been ‘totally obliterated’ in June 2025?
Now that Iran’s Supreme Leader has been martyred, some younger Iranians see the North Korean model as the path forward. Recall the US’s relentless saber-rattling against North Korea until it acquired and tested a nuclear weapon. Guess what. The saber rattling has ended. The only mystery is why the Americans still think this is a clever strategy? How many times does US nuclear strategy need to blow up in our faces before ‘lessons are learned?’ For those unsure, the answer is once. But it quite conspicuously isn’t.
In ye olden days the US had an agreement with Iran called the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) which precluded Iran from developing nuclear weapons. It included a robust inspection regime and Iran was in full compliance with the terms. Then Donald Trump tore the JCPOA up. His reasoning was that he, the Donald, could negotiate a better deal. And then he attacked Iran. Up to the point of the JCPOA being torn up, the Iranians claimed that they didn’t want a nuclear weapon. Now that Iran has the US by the short and curlies, US leverage isn’t what it used to be.
So, the Strait of Hormuz was open until the US and Israel attacked Iran on February 28th. Now it is closed. And Iran was in full compliance with the agreed upon protocol to limit nuclear proliferation until the US tore up the deal. Give the Trump administration more time to ‘negotiate’ and Iran will be charging us rent to live in our own houses. Negotiation requires having cards to play (leverage). Otherwise, capitulation (surrender) is the alternative.
This points to a fundamental flaw in Trump’s ‘peace through strength’ mindset. It makes it a tyrant’s creed. Capitulation to power isn’t peace. It is a state of human bondage. Are orderly concentration camps where the people are docile really the US vision of a great society? Isn’t this Israel’s vision for Gaza? Counter to Nietzsche that Christianity is ‘the ultimate expression of slave morality,’ Trump’s version is a slaver morality. If compliance is noble (‘peace’), why doesn’t the US comply with its international obligations?
Hopefully Americans aren’t so deluded as to imagine that getting rid of Trump will solve this problem. Don’t get me wrong, please (peacefully) get rid of Trump. The weather in Den Hague (The Hague) is very nice this time of year. But the dysfunction infecting the US runs deep. Genocide Joe co-launched the US – Israeli genocide in Gaza. And the establishments of both parties fully support genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, war against Iran, war against Russia and a new Red Scare. The more that things change…
Communism
“While Soviet communism was frequently driven by more practical great-power concerns – the preservation of the Soviet empire and the defense of its material interests around the globe – its Cuban successor was built around a near-singular obsession with the “liberation” of the Global South from its Western colonial oppressors.”
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently commissioned a position paper (link above) from the State Department trying to legitimate a coming US attack on Cuba. The paper puts ideology forward as the motivating factor in both the Cuban Revolution and in Cubans sending doctors abroad to where healthcare is needed. As when Venezuela subsidized US heating fuel prices and the US shut the program down, the Federal government doesn’t want Americans getting decent healthcare. We might get used to it.
Otherwise, the Trump administration, the State Department, and the national Democrats believe that they have a winning electoral strategy with a new Red Scare. The obvious target of the US political establishment, Donald J. Trump presiding, is recent electoral wins by the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America). The source of the Red Scare rhetoric appears to be John Birch Society pamphlets from the 1950s and 1960s. Stated differently, what is being revived is crackpot rhetoric from cloistered ideologues, not historical analysis.
The DSA seems an odd target. Its program is to run ‘socialists’ for public office. The US has elected some solid socialists to public office like Kshama Sawant. But the structural paradox of electing socialists to govern capitalist political economy needs to be considered. There is no
argument here that self-styled socialists shouldn’t run for office and win. The problem is that were every seat in the House, Senate and White House to be occupied by socialists, Goldman Sachs, Northrup Grumman and Microsoft would still run the country. As the saying goes, if voting changed anything, it would be illegal.
This is in no way to be flippant. Electoral politics is one tactic amongst many to employ. But the state of electoral politics in the US, with citizens fleeing the state approved parties but no one to vote for outside of them, is a major point of frustration for many. What is missing from consideration is that the institutions of Western governance such as oligarch funded campaigns, a Congress that runs on legal bribes, and corporate control over basic government functions assure that nothing changes for the better, only for the worse.
Part of what is inexplicable about the American system is that very few Americans support the ‘political center.’ The framing as ‘center’ is misstatement. The Danish NGO Alliance of Democracies publishes a survey that asks the citizens of nations to rank their own countries in terms of adherence to political principles like democracy. In past years fewer than half of (American) respondents have believed that the US is ‘a democracy.’ And the cause isn’t ideological. The reasons given for the US not being a democracy are economic.
This difference in perceptions plays out with ‘authoritarian’ China ranked as being much more democratic by the people of China than Americans rank the US to be. In the AoD’s ‘objective’ democracy ranking, the US is ranked much higher than China in ‘factual’ democracy. But the people aren’t buying it. The reasons why the US isn’t considered to be democratic by Americans have to do with corporate and oligarchic control over US politics. And this gets to the DSA’s conundrum. Americans apparently prefer having control over their own lives to pulling a lever every few years for someone who doesn’t represent our interests.
In this light, Jacobin’s Bhaskar Sunkara was recently interviewed by the New York Times’ Ross Douthat. Sunkara kept the conversation well inside the realm of electoral politics. In his view, and Jacobin’s, socialism is an accumulation of socialists. Ownership of the means of production was only mentioned in passing. The serial disappointment that Americans feel watching progressives being absorbed into the system has done little to shift political focus from personalities to institutions.
Impressive is that very little attention was paid to the shift of the political ‘center’ in the US from welfare-state liberalism to the fascist right (a merging of corporate with state power, ethnic genocide in Gaza, violent political repression by ICE and coming election fraud from the White House). This is meant to be descriptively accurate, not insulting. To be clear, this isn’t remorse over the direction of the country. It is to make the point that no matter which party assumed power, every election in the last five decades has moved the US farther to the political right.
That Democrats have also jumped on the Red Scare bandwagon confirms a lot of premises. The Black Democrat Mayor of my immigrant filled city recently wrote a missive that resembled boilerplate KKK propaganda from the 1950s. He apparently doesn’t know that earlier versions of his views were used by Bull Conner, Lester Maddox, George Wallace and various other segregationists to slander Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and the entire Civil Rights movement. But the ultimate paradox is that the mayor and Donald Trump have exactly the same views on the DSA. To portray the DSA as Bolsheviks is frankly moronic. The Bolsheviks had a political program.
This American practice of explaining history through ideology works well as propaganda because it ignores causes. For instance, Adolf Hitler rose to be Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the worst year of the Great Depression in Germany, while promising to right the German economy. The prominent historical explanations of the rise of National Socialism include the punishing Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression. But to hear the Americans tell it, Germans woke up one morning thinking that fascism was a great idea and then brought Hitler to power.
Graph: Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany in the very pit of the Great Depression. The people of Germany were desperate. While the Weimar government offered austerity cobbled together with more austerity, Hitler claimed to have a way out of the Depression. In the early years, and largely through military Keynesianism, the German economy recovered and then some. The Nazi folly was overreach. This is the same problem that the US is currently experiencing. Source: wikipedia.com.
A similar explanation of the Russian Revolution prevails. WWI began in 1915 and ended in 1918. The Russian Revolution was in 1917. Russia participated in WWI and lost far more people than the Western powers did. This was against a self-interested monarchy (Romanovs) that demonstrated utter contempt for the lives of Russian troops in WWI as the Russian people starved. The idea that the Bolsheviks were bored puffies playing hooky from their bond trading jobs at Goldman Sachs to start a revolution is a low probability explanation. It is easily countered with facts.
Likewise, the Cuban Revolution wasn’t a case of well employed and well-fed people deciding that they were bored with the status quo and that a good cure for this boredom would be to hold a revolution. As is always the case, the people who rebelled saw little alternative to doing so. The American people would have rebelled if they had been in Russia in 1917. The American Revolution proves this. And the American people would have rebelled in Cuba in 1959 with this same evidence in hand. Revolutions are created by the existing powers. They are an effect, not a cause.
Of course, the US State Department and the Trump administration are free to contend that the American Revolution really was frivolous— bored housewives and lazy workers deciding that holding a Revolution was easier than doing the dishes. if it cares to. Booting politically repressive and extractive colonial overlords out of the country so that the people of the US could govern themselves is the generic explanation given for the American Revolution. This doesn’t seem frivolous to yours truly. In contrast to Donald Trump. Marco Rubio and the US State Department, I support the American Revolution.
As the facts have it, Marco Rubio’s family left Cuba in 1956, three years before the Cuban Revolution. Cuba at the time was run by the US-installed strongman and gangster friendly Fulgencio Batista. The point: neither Rubio nor his family ever lived in a communist nation. He has zero personal experience with it. Everything that he knows about Cuba appears to have come from the backs of cereal boxes. But there is a large and persistent network of anti-communist activists tied to US-sponsored terror networks (and here) and the global narcotics trade.
Readers will recall that Donald Trump recently pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in 2024 of importing 400 tons of cocaine (and here) into the US. In 2010 Honduras underwent a right-wing coup that ousted the elected President Manuel Zelaya and replaced him with a State Department-approved caretaker government. Soon thereafter, ‘immigrant armies’ of orphaned children from Honduras were being turned away at the US border.
This reprisal of Red Scare politics comes at an interesting time. The original Red Scare was largely a Western business grift. In 1953 the CIA and MI6 created fake ‘communists’ in order to explain why the US and Britain– ‘bastions of democracy’ both, overthrew the elected government of Iran to seize Iran’s oil for themselves. And when Jacobo Arbenz was ousted as President of Guatemala in 1954, consent was manufactured in the US by claiming falsely that he was himself ‘a communist.’ He wasn’t.
With the Soviet Union and the Chinese communists not exactly in hiding in the 1950s, were the narratives inside the US regarding ‘communism’ plausible, these agencies wouldn’t have had to create fake communists in order to justify US coups. In the early 1960s, with the US military claiming that the Soviets had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons capable of hitting the US, the actual count was later revealed to be four (part of 13-part series). The motivation for the US military to lie about the matter is that the service budgets were based on perceived threats.
In terms of raw totalitarian excess, it was the CIA’s MKULTRA program that produced the Unabomber, Ted Kaszynski, who killed three and injured 23 with mail bombs. After having his personality ‘broken down and then pieced back together’ by the CIA, brilliant mathematician and reported volunteer for the MKULTRA program Kaszynski went full terrorist. This was initially posed as ‘left-wing’ violence and Kaczynski’s manifesto was put forward to support the charge. It wasn’t until the forced disclosure of the CIA’s MKULTRA program that the CIA’s involvement was revealed.
American slavery remains relevant in 2026 because while it was underway it was a capitalist institution. Human beings, called slaves, were bought and sold as ‘capital’ just like a tractor, a loom or automation AI. So, one can criticize slavery in moral terms. But the fact that some people (the owners of slaves) made very good livings from the labor of others (slaves) set the terms for US labor relations through to DOGE. This isn’t ideology speaking. It is history. If someone wants to seriously claim that slaves weren’t considered capital, please have at it.
So, American slavery nominally ended with the Civil War in 1865. But the management practices developed on slave plantations in the American South form the basis of corporate Human Resources departments (and here) today, right now. This is to draw a line directly from the slavery practiced in the US up through 1865 to the rejection letter that you didn’t receive for that job that you applied for because US corporations don’t ‘do’ respect for your humanity because you are a commodity to them, ‘labor.’
One of the political challenges of my own youth was the Vietnam War. It was explained at the time as a fight to the death between freedom and communism. In fact, Vietnam was a former French colony that the US assumed control of from France following WWII. The US created internal divisions in Vietnam and then posed the resulting civil war as ‘communist aggression.’ But it wasn’t communist aggression. It was a civil war. Once the US left Vietnam, the sides reconciled (because Vietnam prevailed) and Vietnam today is a prosperous nation.
The Iranian Revolution (1979) illustrated the US’s use of fake communists to legitimate a Western coup in 1953. According to author Stephen Kinzer in All of the Shah’s Men, the CIA and MI6 overthrew the elected leader of Iran— Mohamad Mossadeq, in order to assume control of Iran’s oil. To affect the coup, the CIA hired fake communists so that the US could pretend that stealing Iran’s oil was somehow a blow against ‘communism.’ Americans in the 1950s trusted the CIA. But the ‘communists’ used by the CIA were paid props. They were paid actors.
What Trump, Rubio and the State Department are doing with Red Scare 2.0 has a long, dubious, history. It is a grift intended to preclude movements of self-determination in nations currently or prospectively being controlled by the US. The irony lies in the posturing. Asserting authoritarian control while pretending to oppose it is a sleight of hand. The people who trust Trump trust him with authoritarian control. The people who don’t trust Trump don’t trust him with authoritarian control. But in both cases acquiring authoritarian control is the purpose behind ‘warning’ us about authoritarian control.
Critics of the USSR always begin in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, not in the decades leading up to it. The same is true of the Chinese Revolution. That Marco Rubio knows nothing about Cuba either before of after the Cuban Revolution is what allows him to keep and maintain his crackpot 1950s anti-communist views into 2026. Further, his ignorance leads him to recreate the material conditions that lead to rebellion.
With Trump’s Roy Cohn Red Slander playbook back out, isn’t it great to see the parties once again working together in bipartisan fashion on the people’s business? We can’t end the forever wars. But hey, at least we aren’t being threatened with economic democracy. The American healthcare system is objectively amongst the worst in the world. Thank God that no one is trying to fix it. A microscopic cabal of oligarchs controls government policy making. But hey, at least we don’t have other people telling us what to do.
From the view that politics is motivated by ideology, every moment of every day is fraught. There is no telling when some ideology might catch on. But from the view of history, reasons— material conditions, motivate history. If one wishes to avoid ‘communism’ in the historical view, don’t create the material conditions that cause revolutions. This was what FDR understood when he created the New Deal. And it is what made the oligarchs opposed to him too clever by half. The people don’t mind social difference. What we really don’t like is having our lives decided by rich assholes.
